Caught on Film
by Qoheleth
Summary: Just whose cameras were those that the toys used to blind the Prospector? And what happened when that family developed their film?
1. A Heart in New York

Disclaimer: I own all the rights to the _Toy Story_ movies; Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Productions do not own a thing; and you, my gentle reader, are Tom Hanks.

* * *

The whole thing started, I guess, in New York City, which my cousin Beth would say isn't surprising. "_Everything_ starts in New York City!" she would say. 

Understand, I'm not trying to deride her. Beth, as the unfolding of this story will show, is a wonderful, caring person and a delight to be with. That, however, does not change the fact that she's a little loopy on the subject of her hometown.

(True story: Once when I was at her house for her parents' fifteenth wedding anniversary, she spent the entire dinner trying to convince me that Thomas Edison was born in New York City. Then, later that evening, when I got out an encyclopedia and verified that he was actually born in Milan, Ohio, she merely sniffed and said, "Well, that's what they'd _like_ us to think.")

But I'm not here to relate Beth's eccentricities. I'm here to tell a story, and that story, as I said, started in New York City, when my parents and I were walking down one of those New York streets with names you can never remember, because they don't have names, just numbers. You know – 34th Street, 92nd Street, 666th Street, and so on.

We were walking down this street, looking for one of the Italian restaurants that are everywhere in New York unless you're looking for one, when my mom grabbed my dad's arm and said, "Just a minute, Tom. Look at that!"

She was pointing to the wall of an old, derelict flower shop, where some severely disturbed individual had spray-painted a capital I, a vaguely symmetrical heart, and the letters XTC, in that order. In terms of intrinsic interest, it wasn't much different from the last twenty graffiti we'd passed, except that, in this one, there happened to be a gecko sitting in the middle of the heart.

Dad, who at this point in the journey was far more interested in finding a reliable source of fettuccini than in looking at geckoes, gave this one a cursory glance and said, "Yes, it's nice, isn't it? Now, come on, let's…"

"Nice?" said Mom. "It's _perfect_. The ultimate image of the ability of life to grow and flourish, even in the most diseased, corrupted corners of the earth."

Dad sighed. "Dana," he said, "now is really not the time…"

But Mom (who, I should mention, is a professional photographer of the "record the small moments in life, no matter where or when you find them" variety) had already pulled out her camera and adjusted the zoom lens, and before Dad could protest further, she clicked the shutter.

Nothing happened.

Mom blinked, shook the camera, and tried again. More nothing.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," Mom said. "It can't be water damage, it was working fine half an hour ago – and it can't be out of…" She glanced down at the film register. "It _is_ out of film! How can that be? It was full when we arrived, and I've only used it four times…" She broke off and gave me a very suspicious look.

"It wasn't me, Mom," I said. "I know better than to mess with your cameras."

"As do I," said Dad.

Mom shook her head and shot a dirty look at the gecko, which, utterly oblivious to her distress, crawled out of the heart to look for a more reliable source of flies.

Mom sighed, and turned to glare at Dad and me. "Let me assure you both of one thing," she said. "First thing tomorrow morning, I will get my film developed. I will examine the resulting photographs carefully. And when I determine who is most likely to have taken said photographs, then will I wreak my revenge."

"Charmed," Dad said. "Oh, look, here's a place – Antonioni's. Shall we?"

"Fine with me," I said.

If I had known just what twists of fate were contained in that camera, Mom's threat might have made a little more impact on me. But, as it happened, I didn't.


	2. Chapter 2

_**Author's note:** This chapter is properly entitled "The Last Thing I Thought I'd Find Was You", but this turns out to be one letter too long for this site. C'est la vie._

* * *

I woke up about 8 a.m. the next morning and sort of slithered down the staircase. The staircase in my aunt and uncle's house has always seemed to be made for slithering down – it's one of those old-fashioned spiral ones, with mahogany banisters and dark red carpeting on the steps.

When I got into the kitchen, Beth was already there, which wasn't surprising. Beth's one of those people who spends maybe four hours asleep per day, and spends the rest of the time in a bustle of activity, trying to fill the unforgiving minute with, if possible, eighty seconds worth of distance run. (My feeling, meanwhile, is that physical activity is something to be done quickly and gotten over with so you can spend more valuable time inert.)

Generally, she slows down a little for meals, but only a little. Right now, for instance, she had – God only knows why – a pen behind her ear, a notepad behind her cereal bowl, and an encyclopedia volume she was holding open with her elbow while she slathered some jam on a piece of toast. (Dry, of course. I've never understood how anyone can enjoy eating dry toast, but Beth insists she does. Maybe it's part of this whole zest-for-life thing she has going on.)

"Where's Mom?" I asked, sticking some bread of my own in the toaster.

Beth glanced up from her research. "Hm? Oh, she went to the Kodak place to get the film in three of her cameras developed."

I blinked. "_Three?_"

"Yep. Seems somebody's been fooling around with her equipment, and she's down to the last few pictures in each of them." She giggled. "When she left this morning, she was ready to rip somebody's head off."

"I can imagine," I muttered, trying to sort everything out in my mind. I could imagine one of Mom's cameras getting loose, and some naïve person – say, Beth's six-year-old brother, Jeff – getting hold of it and taking five or six pictures of the sofa; but under no circumstances could I imagine this happening to _three_ of them.

My musings were cut short by the popping of the toaster. I pulled out my toast, grabbed the butter dish, and sat down next to Beth, who immediately closed the encyclopedia (Britannica, vol. 8, I noticed – Ménage to Ottawa) and moved to put it down beside her chair.

"No, no, that's all right," I said. "You can keep doing… whatever."

"You sure?" said Beth. "It's no trouble, really."

"I'm sure," I said. "Pass the jam."

She did. "I mean it, Jake, it's not a problem. My mother always taught me never to read a book when someone else is at the table…"

"So did mine," I said, "and when either of them comes in, you'll probably want to remove it. I, however, don't mind it a bit."

She smiled. "Thanks."

"Not at all."

Though as things turned out, it didn't much matter, because at that moment the front door slammed, and a few seconds later Mom came into the kitchen.

She was not, however, the Mom I had expected to meet. I had expected a mother in the throes of righteous indignation, all eagerness to put on the red cap and start passing sentence on anything that moved. By contrast, this Mom's dominant emotion appeared to be bewilderment.

"Good morning, Beth," she murmured vaguely. "Good morning, Jake."

"Morning, Aunt Dana," said Beth.

"So, how'd it go?" I asked.

Wordlessly, Mom pulled a handful of photographs from her skirt pocket, dropped them on the table in front of me, and went to make herself some coffee.

I picked up one of the pictures and glanced at it. It was a long-distance shot of what appeared to be a very short old man standing on a conveyor belt.

A _very_ short old man.

With a pickax.

"What the heck is this?" said Beth, picking up another of the photos.

Mom laughed hollowly. "Do I look like I know?"

"Looks like a doll of some kind," I offered. "Though why anyone would make a doll with this facial expression is more than I can say."

Mom nodded. "You're right, it does look like a doll," she said. "In fact, it seems to me I've seen a doll very much like that one before, but I can't remember…"

At this juncture Aunt Louise entered the kitchen. "Morning, Jake," she said. "Beth, Dana. What's up?"

"Nothing much," said Beth. "We're just trying to figure out the pictures that Aunt Dana developed."

Aunt Louise seemed interested. "Oh, really?" she said. "Let's see." She picked up one of the pictures and examined it.

A look of instant recognition crossed her face, and she gleefully exclaimed:

"_Stinky Pete!"_


	3. Tell Me 'bout the Good Old Days

I shot a glance at Beth to see if this name meant anything to her. Judging by her expression, it didn't.

Mom, on the other hand, seemed to perk up. "_That's_ it!" she exclaimed. "I knew I'd seen it before!"

"Only about a hundred times!" said Aunt Louise. "Lordy, I haven't seen one of these in ages."

"Um… excuse me," I broke in. "Who's Stinky Pete?"

Mom and Aunt Louise looked at me blankly. They seemed to be thinking, respectively, _Can this be my son?_ and _Can this be my nephew?_ Then Mom laughed.

"Of course, you wouldn't know about it," she said. "You children of the Space Age wouldn't have time for anything as primitive as _Woody's Roundup_."

"Come again?" said Beth.

Mom sighed. "We're old, aren't we?" she said to Aunt Louise.

"Antediluvian," Aunt Louise agreed.

Mom sighed again, and turned her attention to the other generation. "_Woody's Roundup_," she said, "was one of the biggest children's shows on television in 1957. It was a sort of cute little puppet Western with four major characters: Jessie, the Yodeling Cowgirl…"

"Bullseye, he's Woody's horse…" Aunt Louise sang the words, evidently harking back to the show's theme song.

"Meet the old prospector…" sang Mom.

"And Woody, the man himself, of course!" Aunt Louise concluded.

I interrupted hastily, realizing that a large nostalgia vortex was forming here, from which Beth and I, if we weren't careful, might not escape with our lives. "So, I'm assuming that Stinky Pete is the prospector?" I said.

"That's right," said Mom.

"And this guy here," said Beth, pointing to the bottom of her picture, "would be Woody?"

We stared at the place where she was pointing. A lanky cowboy doll, which none of us had noticed before, was lying at the Prospector's feet.

Aunt Louise seemed surprised. "Yeah, I guess it would," she said. "Funny. I wouldn't have thought you could find two _Woody's Roundup_ toys today, though goodness knows they made enough of them at the time."

"Absolutely," said Mom. "The show was a phenomenon, I'm telling you – it managed to combine all the elements we loved in B Western shows with the elemental appeal of _Howdy Doody_-style puppetry – and it seemed like every kid in America wanted one of the characters. I think I had a Jessie, in fact…"

"Sure you did," said Aunt Louise. "You passed it down to me after you turned into a snippy little intellectual at the age of twelve. I knew that giving you _The Collected Plays of Bernard Shaw_ was a bad idea, but you had your heart set on it…"

"Excuse me," said Beth. "I hate to interrupt, but… if the show was such a big deal, how come the toys are so rare? What happened to it?"

Aunt Louise frowned. "Same as everything else in that decade," she said. "The Russians got it."

Mom laughed. "Really, Louise, there's no need to be melodramatic about it," she said. "Though," she added, "I'm not saying that's a bad description. What happened was, _Woody's Roundup_ was going into its second year, and had every reason to expect continued dominance of the Saturday-morning lineup… and then, on October 4, 1957, _Sputnik_ was launched.

"The show's audience seemed to evaporate overnight. The producers held onto it as long as they could, but they couldn't buck network pressure forever, and on January 11, 1958, _Woody's Roundup_ was unceremoniously cancelled to make way for a more modern, up-to-date, astronaut-oriented program."

"_Captain Cal and Volnok_," said Aunt Louise witheringly, "which lasted maybe two months, and never had any dolls at all."

While all this was going on, I had been comparing the pictures. A thought now struck me. "Hang on a second," I said. "Were the Stinky Pete dolls really made with this expression on their faces?"

Mom glanced at the figure in the pictures (which looked, quite frankly, as though it were in agony) and laughed. "Good heavens, no," she said. "They always looked more befuddled than anything else."

"Which was quite appropriate," said Aunt Louise. "Remember the episode where One-Eyed Jack shows up in Cactus Gulch, and the Prospector mistakes him for his long-lost uncle?"

"How could I forget?" Mom laughed, and assumed the sort of voice someone named "Stinky Pete" might be expected to have. "'Well, blow me down, Uncle Harvey! Ain't seen you since you saddled up Old Iron-Eyes and rode off for parts unknown!' "

Beth and I exchanged significant looks and excused ourselves from the table. Mom and Aunt Louise acknowledged us with a brief nod and went back to the Golden Era.


	4. Is It Life of Which It Tells?

"All right," said Beth, as she flopped down on her bed, "let's go over what we know. Item One: this is a toy."

"I don't think there's any doubt about that," I said.

"No," Beth agreed. "Item Two: these photographs show this toy with a number of different facial expressions, none of which are the expression the toys were manufactured with."

"Right."

"Item Three: unless my eyes deceive me, these photos were taken in the interior of a baggage carousel. Notice the background."

"I agree," I said. "And let me point out – Item Four – that my Mom's cameras passed through just such a baggage carousel at Detroit Metro Airport."

Beth nodded. "And now," she said, "we come to the really significant point. Item Five: Only a complete lunatic would have several Stinky Pete dolls custom-made in different poses and expressions of agony, climb onto a baggage conveyor belt, and take photographs of the dolls with someone else's cameras, at no gain to him- or herself."

"Absolutely," I said. "Your reasoning is very lucid and clear, and I congratulate you. Now, then, how are we to explain the fact – call it Item Six – that the photographs undeniably exist?"

Beth sighed, rolled over on the bed, and stared at the ceiling in silence for a few minutes.

"Well," she finally said, "there's only one thing I can think of… but it's crazy."

"A crazy explanation's better than no explanation," I said.

"Maybe," Beth said dubiously. "Well...what if the pictures of this toy were taken by another toy?"

I blinked. "What?"

"Think about it," Beth said. "What if the _Woody's Roundup_ people somehow stumbled across a way to bring their toys to life? Somewhere in that elaborate baggage carousel, somebody was transporting a complete set of _Woody's Roundup_ toys, and the toys started fighting for some reason, and Jessie – say – grabbed one of your mom's cameras, and used the flashbulb to blind the Prospector until Woody could wrestle him to the ground, and…"

I interrupted. "Let's go back to the complete lunatic, shall we?"

"All right, I _know_ it's farfetched," said Beth, "but really, I can't see any other way of explaining it."

"Are you trying?" I asked pointedly.

Beth sighed. "Maybe not," she said. "I mean… haven't you ever wanted your toys to come to life? When you've had a bad day at school, and you whisper all the miserable details into your teddy bear's ear, haven't you ever wanted him to answer, to tell you that everything's all right, that he'll stick with you against the world?"

She paused expectantly. Clearly, I was expected to say that yes, I knew exactly what she was talking about, but, truth be known, I hadn't ever thought about it before.

"Oh… um, yeah, sure," I muttered.

Beth rolled her eyes. "So no," she said, "I'm not being completely impartial about this; and if you, my dispassionate calculating machine of a cousin, can think of a better answer to this puzzle, I'd be glad to listen to it."

"I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong," I said, "but – well, if some company had accidentally stumbled onto the secret of life, and was using it to make animate dolls, wouldn't we have heard about it by now? I can't imagine they would keep it secret; a thing like that would send their stock value through the roof."

"They might not realize they've done it," Beth said. "The toys might realize instinctively that their function in this world was to be played with, and they would feign lifelessness whenever they came into contact with a human being."

"Now _that_ seems a little farfetched," I said.

"Why?" Beth demanded. "Every other living thing knows what it's supposed to be doing in the world. Deep down, even people do."

That was classic Beth, right there: toss some deep philosophical comment into a discussion and throw everybody completely off track. (She's the only person I know who can turn an argument over pizza toppings into a reflection on the hypostatic union.) I was still struggling to come up with an answer when the door opened and Aunt Louise poked her head in.

She was covered in dust, and her hair was mussed up royally. That was rather unusual, as Aunt Louise is renowned on my mom's side of the family for always looking perfectly elegant. (She's passed it on to her daughter, too. The day I see Beth in blue jeans will be the day Saddam Hussein gets elected pope.) What was even weirder, though, was that she didn't seem to mind. There was a broad grin on her face, the kind of grin that Sir Galahad must have had when he discovered the correct way to ask for the Grail.

"Hey, kids," she said. "Guess what?"

I took a stab. "Um… someone went nuts with a machine gun inside the Supreme Court building and took out the entire liberal wing?"

"Nothing so dull," said Aunt Louise. She opened the door a crack wider and thrust her right hand into Beth's room.

She was holding a worn, dusty cowgirl doll, with red yarn for hair, fake-cowhide pants, and a broad, mildly goofy grin. Even though I had never seen it before, I recognized it instantly.

Jessie.

"I went digging in the attic after our little nostalgia-fest at breakfast," said Aunt Louise. "Took me a couple hours, but I finally found her." She brought the doll's face up to hers and looked into its painted eyes. "And she's very happy about that, aren't you, Jessie-girl?"

With her free hand, she yanked a string on the doll's back. A forty-year-old voice box rattled to life, and Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl said, "_Yodelay_-hee_-hoo_!"

Beth turned to me and raised her eyebrows, and I shot her a look that said, _She's _your _mother._

"Here," said Aunt Louise, tossing the Jessie doll onto Beth's bed. "You three get acquainted. Maybe by the time you come down to dinner, we'll have eliminated some of that nasty cynicism of yours with a healthy dose of old-fashioned values. Tootles." And she shut the door.

I picked up the doll and gave it a quick once-over. Arms and legs limp, vacant facial expression, no observable metabolic activities: I'd never seen a toy look less alive.

"Well, there you go," I said to Beth, dropping the doll on her pillow. "One living toy, ready-made to order."

The look of let-down in Beth's eyes was so pronounced that for one brief second I regretted having made that crack. I might have regretted it longer, if I hadn't heard a broad Texas accent whisper, "What did you say?"

Both of us jerked our heads towards the head of the bed. Aunt Louise's Jessie doll was sitting up on Beth's pillow, her plastic grin replaced by a look of utter, wide-eyed shock.

_Oh, cripes,_ I thought. _Beth's going to be impossible to live with after this._


	5. Room to Make a Big Mistake

It was awkward, really. I mean, here we were, faced with a person whom, fifteen seconds before, we had believed to be an inanimate object. What do you say in that kind of situation?

Neither Beth nor I could think of anything intelligent, so the three of us just sat there for a few minutes, staring. Eventually, the Jessie doll realized something was amiss.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"You're… you're alive," Beth finally managed.

Jessie frowned. "Well, yeah," she said. "Didn't y'all know that?" She turned to me. "Didn't you say…"

"Well, yeah, I did," I admitted, "but saying isn't quite the same as believing."

Jessie's eyes widened. "Then… then you didn't know?" she whispered.

"Until a moment ago, it was just a theory," said Beth. Glancing at me, she added, "And not a popular one with the chattering classes, either."

That piece of news devastated Jessie. She dropped back onto Beth's pillow, buried her face in her hands, and began shuddering violently. "Oh, no… oh, no…" she whispered. "Oh, I'm going to be in so much trouble…"

"Jessie…" Beth reached forward, all her maternal instincts coming forward. "Jessie, honey, it's okay."

"I didn't know," Jessie gasped. "I mean, I've been in a box for thirty years… I thought something had changed…" She looked up at us desperately, and her eyes seemed to be brimming with tears (though I think that was just a trick of the light). "I didn't know!"

"Jessie, honey, listen to me," said Beth. "If any of the other _Woody's Roundup_ toys give you a hard time, you just bring them to me, and I'll tell them just what they can do with themselves."

Jessie blinked. "Are there other _Woody's Roundup_ toys around here?" she asked.

"Well," said Beth, "if there aren't, then you don't have anything to worry about, now do you?"

Jessie looked puzzled for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, it seemed to dawn on her what Beth was talking about. "No," she said doubtfully. "No, I guess not."

"Okay, then," said Beth. "Now, why don't you just calm down, take a few deep breaths, and then we can…" She hesitated.

"Play?" Jessie suggested hopefully.

Beth looked startled for a moment, the way people do when they've been presented with the obvious. Then she smiled, and then started to laugh outright.

Whatever faults Beth may have, she has a wonderful laugh: a sort of cheery, bubbling half-giggle that makes you feel that maybe the world isn't quite that rotten after all. It was just what the doctor ordered for Jessie, who began to show traces of a smile for the first time since coming to life.

"Okay, sure," said Beth when she got her breath again. "We'll play. Cowgirls and Indians, maybe; I'm pretty sure there's Indian blood somewhere in the family…"

"Hang on," I said suddenly. "What's that sound?"

All three of us went silent and listened. From the hallway outside, we heard the tap-tapping sound of high-heeled shoes on a hardwood floor.

Beth and I just had time to exchange an _uh-oh-how-are-we-going-to-explain-this_ look before the doorknob rattled and Aunt Louise popped in again.

"So sorry," she said, brandishing a small, red felt cowboy hat. "On the way up the stairs, I dropped a rather vital accessory." She reached down onto the bed and picked up Jessie.

I closed my eyes, awaiting the revelation. What would happen when Aunt Louise's cherished family memento started squirming in her hands, I didn't know, but, given her history of heart problems, I didn't expect it to be pretty.

"Something the matter, Jake?" came Aunt Louise's voice.

I opened my eyes again. There was Aunt Louise, standing at the foot of the bed; and there was Jessie in her hand – as limp and lifeless a rag doll as I'd ever seen.

"Oh, um… head's bothering me," I said vaguely.

Aunt Louise clicked her tongue. "It's the New York smog," she said. "Not everyone's body is equipped for an atmosphere where pollution is 99 parts in a hundred."

If Beth had been paying attention, she would doubtless have found some way to turn this into a positive aspect of the Big Apple, but I suppose ingenious sophistries become difficult to concoct when all your wits are engaged in staring vacantly at the doll in your mother's hand.

While we were in our stupor, Aunt Louise placed the hat at a jaunty angle on Jessie's head and set her down carefully on Beth's pillow, propping her up against the middle of the headboard. "There," she said. "Much better, don't you think?"

Both of us nodded vigorously.

"Glad I could be of assistance," said Aunt Louise. She ran her fingers through her hair, blew a tiny speck of dust from her hand, and exited.

Instinctively, both of our eyes fell to the figure on the pillow. As we watched, the spark of life came back into Jessie's eyes, and her limp body became vital and self-supporting again. It was like watching current flow into a copper wire, except that in some sense the current seemed never to have left; it had just hidden itself for a while until someone should need electricity again.

She reached up and straightened her hat. "Yeah, that is better," she said. "Good old Louise. She always was a thoughtful girl."

"Jessie," said Beth, in that calm tone she gets after she's been panicking, "what did you do that for?"

Jessie looked surprised that she had to ask. "I'm a toy," she said. "People are supposed to play with toys, not get to know them personally. I've already messed up once today, revealed myself to two kids when I don't even know their names…"

"Jacob Peters and Elizabeth Riley," I said. "Jake and Beth, to friends."

"A pleasure," said Jessie, tipping her hat ironically.

"So what are you saying?" said Beth. "That it's a bad thing for you to have spoken to us?"

Jessie hesitated. "I don't know about _bad_," she said, "but it's not really something I'm supposed to be doing.

"I'm not sorry it happened, though," she added, looking almost fierce. "I'd have just gone back in that closet if it hadn't – kids don't play with cowgirls anymore – and I can't go back in there, I _can't_…" Again she broke into tears, and again Beth reached forward maternally.

"Yeah," I said. "I guess a living toy would need to be played with, just to keep her sane…"

Jessie shook her head. "It's not just that," she said. "I'm the Yodeling Cowgirl, remember? Yodeling Cowgirls can't live in boxes. I need wide-open spaces: valleys to ride through, mountains to ramble over, lonely deserts to go to sleep in with only the coyotes for company…"

She was interrupted by a sudden commotion outside Beth's window. On the street below, some seven motorists had gotten entangled in one of those road-rage incidents so common in the big city. A squeal of brakes, a cacophony of car horns, and several choice phrases that were certainly never heard on _Woody's Roundup_ drifted through the window to our ears.

Jessie sighed.

This, coming on top of Aunt Louise's comments about the smog, was too much for Beth to take. "What?" she said. "You think the American West never has any commotion? Try sleeping through a bison stampede sometime – or better still, just drive through Denver. You'll be praying for a nice, professional New York traffic jam within the hour."

"Watch it," I said, "or I might have to challenge you to a duel for the honor of my homeland."

Jessie looked up, suddenly interested. "Your homeland?" she said. "You're from Colorado?"

"Como, actually," I said. "It's about an hour's drive southwest of Denver. A nice little town."

"It's a horrible little town," said Beth. "You have to drive forty miles through a national forest before you get anywhere useful. Why, on the way to the airport coming over here, Uncle Don had to stop the car while some two dozen elk traipsed merrily across the Interstate."

"Can I go back with you?" Jessie asked eagerly.

I blinked, caught off guard, and glanced up at Beth. There was a startled look in her eyes, mixed with something like a feeling of betrayal. I gathered she had been counting on keeping Jessie for her own.

"Well?" said Jessie.

"Um… well, I'd have to check with Aunt Louise," I mumbled. "She seemed pretty excited about finding you…"

"Oh, she won't mind," said Jessie. "I used to be your mom's toy. You can just say you're reclaiming me."

I looked at Jessie, and her wide, blue eyes pleaded with me to take her along. Then I looked at Beth, and her soft, brown eyes pleaded with me to leave Jessie there. I felt like King Solomon, only without the wisdom.

I suppose if I had had any proper filial loyalty, I would have granted Beth's plea, but on some level I think I felt a responsibility to Jessie. After all, it was my chance remark that had made her come to life, and the distress that had caused her seemed to merit some recompense. Plus, I've always been a sucker for redheads.

I took a deep breath. "Okay, then," I said. "Welcome to the Peters family, Jessie."

Jessie closed her eyes, grinned so broadly I thought her head would split in two, and screamed, "_YEEEEEE-HAAAA!"_

I looked up at Beth and smiled nervously. "You don't think they heard that in the living room, do you?" I said.

Beth didn't answer, but if looks could kill, the NYPD would have shortly been paying a visit to the Riley residence.


	6. Leaving on a Jet Plane

"Thanks for seeing us off like this, James," said Mom as we pulled up to the airport. "I know it's awkward, making you take a Wednesday off…"

"Hey, no problem," said Uncle James. "Wouldn't have wanted you to walk to LaGuardia. Three miles' trudge in mid-August heat, carrying a lot of expensive luggage through America's mugging headquarters? I don't think so."

"Did you hear that?" I said to Beth. "He called New York America's mugging headquarters."

"True greatness always attracts a lot of riffraff," Beth replied. "An elephant has a much bigger flea problem than a Pomeranian."

A short, muffled snort came from the inside of my backpack.

"This your terminal?" said Uncle James.

Mom pulled out the tickets. "Looks like it."

"Okay, then," said Uncle James, stopping the minivan in front of the sliding doors. "Let's get your baggage out of here, say our goodbyes, and speed you folks on your way."

Taking the hint, I grabbed my carry-on bag and hopped out into the street. Beth got out on her side, and the two of us met behind the van.

There was an awkward silence.

"So," Beth finally said. "It's off to the Centennial State with you, huh?"

"Looks like it," I said.

Pause.

"Can you forgive me?" I asked.

Beth shrugged. "Call my lawyer tomorrow morning," she said. "He'll let you know."

You have to know Beth pretty well to know that this means, "Shut up and hug me, you idiot." Fortunately, I do.

"Oof!" Beth gasped. "Jake, not so hard! Not all of us are swim-team champions, you know!"

I relaxed a hair. "Sorry."

Beth sighed. "That's okay," she said. "If you didn't try to crush my ribs, I'd think you were holding back."

"And you'd probably be right."

It wasn't much of a comeback, but it made Beth laugh for the first time that day, so I felt like I'd accomplished something.

Then she turned her head, and nudged my backpack with her chin. "You mind if I…"

I'd have been pretty stupid not to have expected this. "Sure, go ahead."

Beth detached herself from my arms, walked around behind me, and unzipped the flap. "Bye, Jess," she whispered.

"See you round, partner," came the voice from inside my pack.

"Don't you worry about a thing, now," said Beth. "Jake may not be the most sensitive guy on Earth–" I mumbled a little at that– "but he's a kind, trustworthy person, and he'll be able to take care of you."

"If anyone can," Jessie muttered.

"Now don't you talk like that," said Beth. (Geez, she was sounding exactly like her mother.) "Nothing's going to happen to you. You'll live out in Colorado, you'll have all kinds of adventures out among the sagebrush forests, you'll strum your guitar and yodelay-hee-hee, and it'll be the life you'll love the best."

Jessie and I both snickered at that, and the sound seemed to remind Uncle James that there was still someone back here. "Come on, Beth, let's wrap it up!" he called. "Jake and his parents have to get moving, or they won't get to spend their requisite hour twiddling their thumbs in the lobby."

"Go on, now," Beth whispered. She gave the backpack one last pat, went around the side to get in the van, and settled into her seat. The last I saw of her, before Uncle James revved the engine and drove off, she was staring out her window at me, looking a little like Grandpa Castelli in my parents' wedding album when he was giving Mom away.

I shook my head. "What were you two doing when I wasn't around, anyway?" I whispered.

I felt Jessie shrug inside my backpack. "We played," she said. "We talked. Sometimes she'd pick me up and just hold me for half an hour."

She didn't say anything else, but the tone of her voice made it pretty clear that Beth had been doing everything that needed to be done.

I didn't say anything more, but as we wove our way through the airport, I thought to myself, _Jacob Heathcliff Peters, you are in so far over your head._


	7. Raindrops Falling on Her

On our trip to New York, we had changed planes at Detroit Metro, but when we went home, we made the stopover in O'Hare. Dad said that was good, because, in the religion of air travel, it was sacrilegious to fly anywhere without stopping in O'Hare at least once. (I think he was kidding.)

Of course, once we got to O'Hare, it turned out to be raining at a rate of about five tons of water per minute, so the hundred or so of us in the airplane had to sprint across the runway with our arms over our heads (all except Mom, who said she had paid six times more for her jacket than for her hairdo, and she intended to keep her priorities straight), stagger into the airport lobby, plop down on the most absorbent chair we could find, and wait for the monsoon to let up enough for our next plane to take off.

I had been sitting for about ten minutes, with my eyes closed, my head thrown back, and the water rolling off my body and forming ever-enlarging damp spots on the chair and the lobby carpet, when it occurred to me to glance down at my backpack and see how Jessie was holding up. Only then did I realize that Beth hadn't zipped the flap back up after she told Jessie good-bye, and that waterproof Teflon doesn't really protect stuff that much when you leave it open in the middle of a Chicago flood.

Hastily, I grabbed the backpack, told Mom and Dad I needed to use the restroom, and walked briskly out of the lobby before either of them could ask me why I needed my backpack to fill the reservoir.

* * *

"This is no way to treat a valuable collector's item, you know," Jessie grumbled as I ran her back and forth under the air dryer. "There are probably museums that would pay top dollar for me, and here you are just leaving me to mildew."

"Look, Jessie," I said, rolling my eyes, "I said I'm sorry, all right?"

Jessie didn't respond.

"All right?" I repeated, only to glance down and realize that she had snapped into the lifeless-toy mode that she had had when we had first met, and again when Aunt Louise had come into Beth's bedroom. As near as I could figure out, she did it every time a human being (except, now, me or Beth) was around, although why she was doing it now…

Then I realized that I was standing in a public restroom, and that it was not unheard of for human beings to enter public restrooms. I turned around, and sure enough, some idiot in a University of Michigan cap was standing behind me, staring at me with a look that said quite clearly, _A cowgirl doll? Dude, I've seen some pathetic stuff in my time, but that takes the cake._

Over the course of the next few days, I came up with about fifteen nonchalant but extremely cutting remarks that would have met this situation beautifully. At the time, what I did was grin weakly and raise my hand slightly, as though holding Jessie up for this nincompoop's inspection. The galoot shook his head wonderingly, then shuffled over to the far wall and disappeared into one of the stalls.

As soon as he locked the door, I felt the lump of cloth in my hand tremble slightly, and heard Jessie's voice say sarcastically, "Nicely handled, Jake. I'm so glad you're my new owner."

I glared down at her. "You could have been a little more help yourself," I said. "You were free to say something to that guy, you know."

"No, I wasn't," said Jessie.

"Why not?" I demanded. "What's the deal with this I-can't-be-real-around-people thing? Where is it written that when a company figures out how to make toys that can talk, it has to hide the fact from everyone in the world who might conceivably care?"

I was talking to an inanimate lump of fabric. With a sigh, I looked up again, and the elderly man who was drying his hands next to me shook his head in a manner reminiscent of Polonius ("'_A is far gone, far gone"_), tossed his paper towel into the trash, and walked out the restroom door towards the lobby.

I sighed, and looked back down into Jessie's once-again-bright eyes. "Okay, listen, cowgirl," I whispered. "If we keep doing this much longer, the entire city of Chicago's going to think that my elevator doesn't go all the way to the top floor. We need to work out a different system."

"What did you have in mind?" said Jessie.

"I'm not sure," I said. "Maybe I could sneak you into the girls' restroom, and you could dry yourself off there. I'm pretty sure you'd look more natural in that context."

"Well, but someone might…" Jessie began, then froze as our friend in the Michigan cap flushed his toilet and came out of his stall. I'm not sure, but I think he deliberately lingered over the cleaning-up process so he could smirk at me a little longer; then he sauntered out of the restroom, and Jessie said, as though she had never been interrupted, "…come in and see me lying on the floor, and walk off with me – and what would Beth say then?"

"Oh, come on, Jessie," I said. "You've got to start being less suspicious of people. Maybe one out of a hundred people would walk off with a doll that didn't belong to her; the other ninety-nine would remember what their mothers taught them about honesty and take it to the Lost and Found – and that's where I'll look for you, if you're not waiting for me when I get done in here."

Jessie hesitated – hesitated a little longer than she had to, in fact, since she had to wait for the middle-aged black man who entered the restroom at this point to get out of hearing distance – then whispered, "Okay, let's do it."

* * *

That was easier said than done, of course. The women's restroom had even more people coming in and out of it than the men's, and it took me nearly three minutes of lying in wait in the little vestibule between the doors to find a moment when I could dart in, drop Jessie on the floor, turn on the blow dryer, and dart back out again.

Eventually, though, I managed, and went back into the men's room to finish drying off the rest of the stuff in my backpack. The couple of books I'd had in there were the worst; it took me nearly a quarter of an hour to make sure that none of _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_'s pages would wind up stuck together, and _Think iFruity _I gave up on altogether and pitched into the trash can with the paper towels. It had only cost me nine bucks, and I could always get another copy out of the library.

Everything else turned out to be more or less waterproof, although the portable CD player caused me that irrational concern that I think most people feel when they see water get on electrical equipment – as though a hair dryer dropped in a bathtub could electrocute you even if it wasn't plugged in, just because it was a hair dryer. Apart from that, the only things in the backpack were a few copper models of New York landmarks that Beth had given me (so I wouldn't "forget my sojourn in the citadel of the West"), a couple pairs of socks I had been planning to throw into the laundry as soon as we got home anyway, and the inside of the backpack itself, which didn't require blow-drying so much as turning upside down and dumping the water out of it. After I was done with that, I packed everything back up (except _Harry Potter_, which it seemed wiser to carry manually), zipped the pack shut, and went out to wait for Jessie.

When I got out to the vestibule, a little girl with kinky brown hair was coming out of the ladies' room. Evidently she was aspiring to a career in vandalism when she grew up, because the three or four Barbie dolls that were squished together inside the netting on the back of her backpack all had their faces colored over with Magic-Marker drawings of hearts, flowers, and rainbows. I dearly hoped Jessie had managed to avoid getting snagged by her; I could just imagine what Beth would say if she heard that I had gotten her surrogate daughter turned into the Oklahoma Beatnik.

It turned out that I didn't need to worry. No sooner had Little Miss Visigoth skipped out into the lobby than I felt a tug on my jean leg, and I looked down to see Jessie staring up at me urgently. The yarn in her ponytail still looked a little damp, but evidently she had more important things on her mind.

"Jake!" she hissed. "Did you see the girl that just left?"

"The one with Lydia the Tattooed Barbie, you mean?" I said. "Yeah, I saw her. Why?"

"Where did she go?" Jessie demanded.

I blinked. "Um… into the lobby somewhere, I assume. Probably she's waiting for a plane, the same as the…"

"No!" said Jessie, her plastic eyes blazing. "She can't get on board a plane yet! You have to find her!"

I held up a hand. "Jessie, I think you need to calm down," I said. "Just relax for a minute, and then tell me what's wrong."

"We might not have a minute!" Jessie insisted.

"Take one anyway."

She glared at me, but folded her arms and obediently took a deep breath. "Okay," she said. "Did you see what she was carrying?"

"Um… no," I said. "All I saw was her backside – and those maltreated stick figures, of course. Why, what was she carrying?"

"The Prospector!" said Jessie. "She's got the Prospector!"

I stared. She couldn't mean… no, it was impossible…

"Um… Jess…" I said, "when you say 'the Prospector', you mean…"

"I mean the Prospector!" said Jessie, annoyed. "That little greenhorn's gotten hold of Stinky Pete!"


	8. Secret Agent Man

Some things are just too big to be taken in all at once. It took my brain about fifteen seconds to fully accept that Jessie was saying what it sounded like she was saying; once it did, I scooped her into my arms and headed back into the men's room.

"Hang on," said Jessie. "Where are we going?"

"Somewhere where we can have an extended conversation without you freezing up on me every three seconds," I said, slipping into the nearest stall and locking the door. "Now, let's try this again. You're saying that that little girl who just came out of the ladies' room is in the possession of the Stinky Pete doll that my mom's camera photographed in the DMA baggage carousel?"

"Huh?" said Jessie, looking genuinely bewildered.

I blinked. "Didn't Beth tell you about this?"

Jessie shook her head.

"Well, my mom's camera ran out of film the day after we arrived in New York," I said. "When she got it developed, there were a whole bunch of pictures of a Stinky Pete doll cringing in agony in the baggage carousel at Detroit Metro Airport. We never figured out how they got there, but that was what made Beth think that you might be alive."

"Oh," said Jessie. "Well, I don't know anything about that. All I know is that there was a Stinky Pete in that girl's hands, and you've got to go get him for me."

"Now hold on," I said. "What's so important about this particular Stinky Pete that you expect me to go steal him from this girl?"

"You wouldn't have to steal him," said Jessie. "Just tell her that you needed to borrow him for a few minutes; make up some good reason. I just want to talk to him for a little while."

"Why?"

Jessie swallowed. "Okay… you know how you feel about Beth?"

I thought for a moment. "Yeah."

"Well, that's sort of what it's like with _Woody's Roundup _toys," said Jessie. "We were all made by the same company, and the characters we're based on were invented by the same people, so it makes us kind of like, well…"

"Family," I finished.

Jessie nodded. "And I haven't seen a Woody or a Prospector in thirty years," she said, "and I probably never will again, the way Beth was talking, so… please?"

I sighed, wishing I'd been able to keep my big mouth shut on Beth's bed that other day. This was the second decision in less than a week that I was making against my better judgment in order to keep a neurotic cowgirl doll happy.

"Okay, fine," I said. "Though for all we know, she's already gotten on a plane to Australia, and we'll never see her again."

Inwardly, I was praying, _Please, God, let her have gotten on a plane to Australia._

* * *

But, of course, God likes a good laugh as much as the next three persons, so as soon as I stepped out of the bathroom and turned the corner, I saw the toy world's answer to Picasso standing in front of a vending machine, with Stinky Pete draped casually over her shoulder. (I noticed, idly, that Mom hadn't been kidding about how stupid the _Woody's Roundup_ people made their Prospectors look.)

I ran a hand through my hair and reviewed my options. What could I say to this girl that would give her a good reason to let some random stranger in an airport walk off with her toys?

As soon as I'd asked myself the question, I realized the answer. Airport – that was the key word. Now if I could just pull it off – and try not to think about all the laws I would probably be breaking…

I took a deep breath, walked up behind the little girl, and cleared my throat. "Excuse me, Miss," I said.

The girl turned around and frowned at me. "Yes?"

"I was wondering about that doll on top of your backpack," I said. "May I ask where you got it from?" I was trying to put a mature, quietly authoritative sound in my voice; judging from the way Jessie giggled when I imitated it to her later, I might not have quite succeeded, but it seemed to be good enough for the girl.

"You mean Leroy?" she said with a grin. "He's pretty funny-looking, isn't he?"

"He's certainly quite striking," I said. "That's part of what makes me so interested in him."

"I think I improved him, don't you?" said the girl, pulling "Leroy" off of her backpack and looking at him critically. "He's got a much nicer complexion now than when I found him."

Personally, I disagreed. It looked to me like she had colored over his face with different-colored crayons a bunch of times and then erased it again, leaving him the same sort of dull-orange color as the Kazon on _Star Trek_. I didn't bother to mention this, though.

"So you found him, did you?" I said. "And where was that?"

The girl shrugged, as though the question was completely unimportant to her. "I dunno," she said. "Mom made me send my backpack through the baggage thing when we were in Detroit, and when I got it back he was on it."

_A baggage terminal in Detroit, _I thought. _So this _could_ be the Prospector in Mom's photos. Interesting._

"Interesting," I said out loud.

"Why?" said the girl, looking nervous. "Did I do something wrong?"

I shook my head reassuringly – at least, I hoped it was reassuring. "No, no, of course you didn't," I said. "It's just that…" I paused, and lowered my voice for dramatic effect. "Tell me, my dear, can you keep a secret?"

In retrospect, I'm amazed that I thought this would work. When I was in kindergarten, the first thing they taught me was never to trust strangers who started talking about secrets; I knew about sex offenders before I knew what sex was. But I guess schools have gone down in the world since then, because the girl's eyes gleamed and she nodded fiercely.

"Okay, then," I said. "I'm working with the government to help track down people who put bombs on airplanes. One of the people we're looking for is a man who hides bombs in toys like that and puts them on people's luggage as they're leaving on vacation; then the bombs blow up while they're going back home. So, if you don't mind, I'm going to have to take Leroy to my partner and have him make sure that he's safe."

Any guilt I might have felt about deceiving an innocent child vanished when I saw that little girl's reaction to this news. I honestly believe that I might have made her entire life with that cock-and-bull story.

"That's so cool!" she said. "Are you an undercover agent? Is that why you're not wearing a black suit like a regular CIA guy?"

I nodded. It's nice when the people you're trying to trick start helping you with your story.

"And if I don't give Leroy to you," said the girl, "then he's going to blow up while I'm on the plane back to Milwaukee and kill everybody?"

"He might," I said. "That's what my partner and I want to check."

"Here you go, then," said the girl, extending the Prospector to me with an air of stern, patriotic resolve, as though she were saying, "I regret that I have but one old-geezer doll to give for my country." (Let me tell you, you don't know what cute is until you've seen a ten-year-old girl playing Nathan Hale over an orange-faced toy claim-jumper.)

I took the old boy with a grateful nod. "Thank you, miss," I said. "This shouldn't take too long, so… will you still be here in half an hour?"

"Probably," said the girl. "Daddy said the plane wouldn't take off until the rain ended, and the man on the TV said that wasn't going to be for a while."

"Okay, then," I said. "In half an hour, meet me back here at this same place, and, if it turns out to be safe, I'll give Leroy back to you. And remember, you can't tell anyone about this, because otherwise the Doll Bomber might find out that we're on to him. Get it?"

The girl grinned. "Got it."

"Good."

I tucked Stinky Leroy under my shoulder and headed off to my appointed clandestine rendezvous.


	9. Behind Closed Doors

When I got back to the restroom, there was no sign of Jessie anywhere. I started to panic, but then saw a folded-up paper towel lying next to the trash can that looked like something had been poked out of it. When I picked it up and unfolded it, there were tiny letters poked out of it that read "J CLOSET".

I was impressed by Jessie's resourcefulness. As near as I could make out, she had picked up a paper towel that had managed to miss the can, dipped her finger in a nearby puddle of water, traced the letters onto the paper towel, and then poked out the damp paper – which I was pretty sure I couldn't have done, even if my fingers had been as small as hers. I guess Sheriff Woody was interested in more than just a pretty face when he picked his girlfriend.

I stepped out of the restroom and looked over at the janitor's closet. Sure enough, there was Jessie lying right outside, propping the door open with her right leg. When she saw me, she gestured for me to come up to her, and then whispered through her frozen smile, "Good work, partner. Now, slip the Prospector into the closet and skedaddle."

"Why?" I whispered back. "Can't you just go back into the restroom stall?"

"Too much traffic," said Jessie. "The Prospector's got more sense than me; he won't talk unless he's a good ways away from any human. Come on, Jake, trust me on this one."

I hesitated, then slipped my hand through the crack of the door and tossed the Prospector inside; he landed with a clatter in what sounded like a pile of empty cleaner bottles. Jessie scootched inside after him, and the closet door shut with a clang.

At this point, a strictly honorable person would have gone off and found something else to do for half an hour. After all, it was pretty clear that Jessie and her gold-toothed brother didn't want anyone with a metabolism listening in on their conversation. So while there are a number of things about that day that I am not proud of, the fact that I went back to the restroom vestibule, picked up my backpack and _Prisoner of Azkaban_ from where I'd left them, and then snuck back over to the closet and sat down to listen, probably holds pride of place.

At the time, I rationalized it by telling myself that the janitor could be back at any minute, and the toys needed a sentry to let them know when he was coming. In retrospect, though, I don't think I ever really believed that. We were talking about a group of toys cautious enough to keep their animacy a secret from the world for forty years; surely they were keeping an ear peeled for the janitor's cart. (In fact, I was a little surprised they didn't hear my own footsteps; maybe Beth was right about there being Indian blood in our family.) No, my real reason for spying on Jessie was probably sheer cussedness; I was pretty sure she was keeping something about herself secret from Beth and me, and I was hoping that she'd let it slip if she thought she was talking privately to another _Woody's Roundup_ toy.

But, whatever the reason, I did listen in on Jessie and Stinky Pete's conversation – and I'm still not quite sorry I did, because, if I hadn't heard what I did through that closet door, I probably wouldn't have handled Jessie's revelation of a few months later nearly as well.

* * *

The first voice I heard was an old man's voice, in which a grave, cultured tone was combined with an almost frightening harshness. It wasn't at all the sort of voice I had expected a Stinky Pete doll to have, but, unless there was a third talking toy in that closet, that was who it was.

"You told the boy?" he said, and a shiver went down my spine.

"I didn't know," said Jessie's voice; she sounded like she was pleading. "I hadn't seen a human for thirty years; I didn't know if the old rules still applied. And then the way they talked…"

"'They'?" the Prospector repeated. "There's another one who knows what you are?"

"He has a cousin in New York City," said Jessie. "A sweet girl, she is – just like her mother…"

I heard the Prospector sigh. "Oh, you poor girl," he said. "You poor, mixed-up Jessie-girl."

"What's the matter?" Jessie demanded, her Texas accent getting a little thicker in her emotion. "What's so wrong about what I'm doing?"

"You know the rules, Jessie," said the Prospector. "You know what happens to us when we keep the veil broken for too long."

Jessie sighed. "Yeah, I do," she said. "But still… I mean, why does it have to be that way? If we can know they're alive, why can't they know the same thing about us?"

There was a moment's silence before the Prospector answered; I couldn't decide whether he was thinking about the question or just giving her one of those withering looks that my mom's so good at. "Do you know something, Jessie?" he said. "You are a lot like that other Jessie I knew not long ago."

"You knew another Jessie?" Jessie said. I could hear the surprise in her voice, and I was a little startled myself. Only a few days ago, I'd never heard of these toys, and now they seemed to be everywhere.

"Oh, yes," said the Prospector. "Less than two weeks ago, I was part of a complete set – a Woody, a Jessie, a Bullseye, and myself, all together. Oh, we were a rare collection indeed; a museum in Tokyo was offering top dollar to display us."

"But then how…" Jessie began.

"How did I wind up on Amy's backpack, covered in Crayola wax?" said the Prospector, the bitterness in his voice almost making my ears hurt. "Quite simply. Our Woody refused to forget his old owner, and he convinced Jessie and Bullseye that their lives wouldn't be worth living unless some ten-year-old child was wearing them to bits playing The Roundup Gang Meets Buzz Lightyear."

He sighed. "I did everything to dissuade them – I even raised my pickax against the Sheriff at one point – but it did no good. They were determined to have their way – and in the end, because I wouldn't go along, they tied me to Amy's backpack while we were in the baggage carousel."

I dearly wanted to speak up at this point, but I knew that would be the end of the ball game. Fortunately, Jessie, darling girl that she was, asked my question for me. "Did they take pictures of you?" she said.

"How do you know about that?" said the Prospector suspiciously.

"That was how the boy found out," said Jessie. "It was his mother's camera."

"Ah," said the Prospector. "And now our paths have crossed again."

"Looks like it," said Jessie.

"A strange thing, life," said the Prospector.

"So how am I like this other Jessie?" Jessie wanted to know.

"Because," said the Prospector, "even though you know how things really are, you want to believe that they can work out differently for you. It was just the same with that other Jessie: she had already been abandoned by one child; she knew perfectly well what heartless imps children really are; and yet she let Woody persuade her that _Andy_ –" his voice dripped with contempt as he pronounced the name – "was somehow different from her old owner, that he would never leave her on a roadside for the Tri-County Charities to pick up."

"Maybe he wouldn't," said Jessie.

"No," the Prospector agreed. "Maybe he'll simply leave her in a box in the attic and forget about her for a generation or so."

I winced. I didn't need to be able to see Jessie to know how much that image hurt her.

"I don't know what he's going to do when he outgrows her," the Prospector continued, "but sooner or later he will. They all do. It's the way of the world, and one little Jessie doll can't do anything about it – any more than another Jessie doll can change the Rule of Concealment simply by wanting it not to be the rule anymore."

The closet was silent for a few minutes after that; then I heard an odd sound that I eventually realized was Jessie swallowing. (Don't ask me what, since she didn't have any saliva, but I'm pretty sure that's what it was.)

"Prospector," she said, so softly that I had to lean against the wall to make out her words, "I'm not going to argue with you. I'm sure you're right about all this, and I reckon I'm in all the trouble you say I am. But I didn't have Jake pick you up so I could hear what a cotton-headed fool I am."

"Why _did_ you have him pick me up?" the Prospector inquired.

Jessie sighed. "Because I couldn't leave without talking to you," she said. "You're the only toy I've seen who remembers the old days; I thought that maybe, if I could get a moment alone with you, we could forget about _Sputnik_ and Captain Cal and all the lousy stuff that's happened to us in forty years, and just have a little bit of 1957 back again."

"Ah," said the Prospector. "I see."

"But probably that's another one of those things I shouldn't want," said Jessie. "After all, it's against the rules of the universe, isn't it? You don't get to have yesterday again. So I guess I should just go and get Jake and be heading off to Denver." The series of sounds that accompanied this sentence suggested that she was standing up and brushing herself off. "So long, Prospector. Sorry to bother you."

"Well, now, wait a moment," said the Prospector, with a new gentleness in his tone. "You're right that we can't go back to the past, but there's no rule that says we can't remember it."

There was a moment's silence, which was broken by an almost relieved giggle from Jessie. "So you've been feeling that way too, huh?" she said.

"On occasion," said the Prospector. "Amy's Barbie dolls don't give a person much opportunity to relive his glory days. Now, what would you like to remember?"

"Oh, let's see," said Jessie. "I always liked the part in the pilot episode when I'm coming into town for the first time, and I meet you panning for gold by the riverside. You remember how that goes?"

The Prospector chuckled, and altered his voice to something higher-pitched, twangier, and just generally more Stinky-Petrine. "'Wal, shoot fire, li'l missy!'" he exclaimed. "'Ain't you jes' 'bout the purtiest thing that ever fell out of the ole buttermilk sky?'"

Maybe it was the contrast with his former bitter dignity, or maybe it was the squeal of delight that Jessie gave – or maybe it was the sheer silliness of the whole thing. Whatever the reason, I felt somehow that it would just be churlish of me to listen in on this part of their conversation, so I got up from the floor (being careful not to make any sound, of course) and wandered back over to the main terminal. After all, it wasn't as though they hadn't already given me plenty to think about.


	10. Just Gotta Be Travelin' On

I wasn't sure, as I paced around the row of vending machines, why the conversation between the two of them had disturbed me so much. So far as I could remember, they hadn't said or implied anything that I didn't already know – and yet, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that my suspicions about Jessie hiding something had been justified.

The only thing I could put my finger on was that line about the Rule of Concealment. It was just a vague impression, but it seemed to me that, when the Prospector had used that phrase, he had said it almost the way a devout Christian might say "the doctrine of the Trinity": as though it were something that people had known about ever since people had known about anything, and it was certainly far too late to be complaining about it now. In fact, the whole tone of that conversation had suggested that _Woody's Roundup_ toys had been hiding their animacy from humans for uncounted eons – which didn't make sense, since there hadn't even been any _Woody's Roundup_ toys before 1957 or whenever it was.

I'm not sure how long I stood there brooding about that, but it must have been a while, because I was suddenly jerked out of my reverie by a high contralto voice whispering conspiratorially, "So, how did it go?", and I turned around to see the kinky-haired girl with the backpack – the one the Prospector had called Amy – staring up at me expectantly.

"Oh," I said, suddenly remembering the appointment I had made with her. "Oh, yes. Well, I haven't heard anything from our bomb-defusal expert yet…"

Amy frowned. "Well, it's been half an hour," she said.

"Has it, now?" I said, trying to sound nonchalant and James-Bond-like. "Well, then, I'd better go and check up on them, hadn't I? Stay right here, and I'll be back in a tick."

As I scampered hastily back toward the janitor's closet, it occurred to me that I might have overdone the James Bond routine. Specifically, what I thought was, _"I'll be back in a tick"? Good grief, Peters, why didn't you just say "Tally-ho, eh what?" and get it over with?_

I sighed. Lucky for the world I would only be a secret agent for a few more minutes.

* * *

I fully expected, when I got back to the closet, to find that the janitor had been by and locked it back up again. I wasn't sure how I was going to handle that; maybe Jessie could climb up to the doorknob and unlock it from the inside. A toy as resourceful as she was ought to be able to manage that.

But, as it turned out, it never became an issue. Either O'Hare is a much dirtier place than it looks, or the janitor had dropped dead of a coronary somewhere while scrubbing out one of the water fountains, but whatever the reason, the door was still unlocked and slightly ajar when I got back to it. I took a moment to thank Heaven for small favors, and then rapped softly on the door.

"Jessie?" I whispered. "Time to go."

There was a rattle of cleaning equipment behind the door, and then Jessie peeked out from the crack, looking more content than I'd seen her since she first came to life. "Has it stopped raining already?" she said with a sigh.

"Um… I don't think so," I said. (To tell the truth, I'd almost forgotten that we were waiting for a plane.) "It's just that I told that girl that we'd only take half an hour, and she's waiting out by the vending machine to get Leroy back."

"Oh," said Jessie.

She didn't say anything more, but I was getting to be very sensitive about the tones of that cowgirl's voice. "Okay, _now_ what's the matter?" I said. "You've had plenty of time to get reacquainted with your long-lost Cousin Peter, and to judge by the expression on your face you've had a wonderful time."

"Oh, I'm not complaining," said Jessie. "At least, not for me. It's just… do we really have to give the Prospector back to Amy?"

I stared at her. "Jessie," I said, "how many times do I have to tell you that I am not interested in stealing little girls' toys?"

"But the Prospector's not Amy's toy, Jake," said Jessie earnestly. "He's been telling me all about it. He ought to be in a museum in Japan right now, only the other toys ganged up on him and stuffed him in her backpack a week ago. And besides, he's not… if you'd talked to him… I mean, he just doesn't belong in a little girl's toy chest."

Remembering the proud, bitter old man I had heard through the closet door, I was inclined to agree with her. Still, I was running out of indulgence for these caprices of hers. "So what are you saying, then?" I said. "That I should go up to Amy and tell her all this, in the hopes that she'll let him go with us to Como?"

"No, I don't think so," said Jessie calmly. "He doesn't really want to be your toy any more than he wants to be Amy's. I'm not sure what he wants, but I think just leaving him here and letting him ride his own cattle train would make him as happy as anything else we could do. And as for Amy, I don't know what you told her so she'd let you take him, but, whatever it is, isn't there some way you could finagle it so she didn't mind not getting him back?"

I swallowed. "Well, yeah…"

"Okay, then," said Jessie.

"But just because I _can_ do it doesn't mean I'm _going_ to do it," I added quickly. "There are all kinds of things I _can _do –" (_like tearing certain cowgirl dolls limb from limb, _I thought but didn't say) "– but I like to think I have a rudimentary sense of morality, and duping little girls out of their toys isn't the sort of thing that… that…"

They shouldn't be allowed to give dolls such wide, blue eyes. Jessie was just looking up at me, not saying a word, and yet she somehow managed to make me feel like the biggest heel south of the Canadian border. (Come to think of it, Beth always managed to do the same thing when I argued with her. Where do girls learn these things?)

"Oh, all right," I muttered.

Jessie grinned. "You're a regular _compinche_, Jake," she said. "Good luck. I'll be waiting in your backpack when you get back."

* * *

Amy, true to form, was delighted when I told her that her doll had indeed turned out to be a mad extremist's tool of death, and that she wouldn't be getting it back. I swear, there's something wrong with that child.

She wanted to tell her parents that someone had stolen Leroy from her, but I put the kibosh on that line of thought right away, and eventually we decided that she had put him down someplace to go to the bathroom and had then forgotten where he was. (This didn't strike me as terribly plausible, but at least it wouldn't lead to any unpleasant situations involving airport security. I gathered that Amy hadn't displayed any particular affection for her newfound toy, having regarded it principally as a test subject for her cosmetics skills, and so her parents wouldn't be likely to spend much effort looking for it beyond a cursory check of the airport's Lost and Found. This was heartening.)

Once that had been taken care of, I went back to the bathroom vestibule, gathered up my backpack (in which Jessie, as promised, was lying motionless), and headed back out to the terminal, trying to figure out how I would explain to my mom why it had taken me nearly an hour to go to the bathroom.

* * *

"What do you mean, you were just wandering around?" Mom demanded.

"I mean I was just wandering around," I repeated. It was a lame story, but it was the best I could think of, and I intended to stick to it. "What's the big deal? O'Hare's a big airport; there's a lot of room to wander around in."

Mom groaned. "Jake, honey, you do realize we're not in Como anymore, right?" she said. "You can't do this sort of thing in a big-city airport – especially not in a city like Chicago. I know it's been a long time since the Roaring Twenties, but the Outfit's still very much a going concern out here, and I don't want to pick up the _Park County Republican_ one day and read, 'LOCAL BOY'S BODY FISHED OUT OF SOUTH RIVER'."

I sighed. "Okay, Mom, I'm sorry," I said. "I should have come back and checked with you before I disappeared. But, anyway, I didn't get killed, and I'm back now: shouldn't that count for something?"

Mom looked dubious, but, before she could respond, the air-traffic controller's voice started announcing through the loudspeaker, "_Northwest Airlines Flight 923 to Denver is now boarding. We apologize for the inconvenience._"

"That's us," said Dad. "Come on, folks. Let's get out of here before Jake gets into any more trouble."

"Amen to that," I muttered under my breath.


	11. Looking Down on Creation

"Jessie, stop squirming in there," I whispered. "Not all of us have denim legs, you know. You're going to bruise my thigh if you're not careful."

"I can't help it," came Jessie's voice from inside my backpack. "I told you I didn't like being cooped up in small spaces. How much longer are we going to be up here, anyway?"

"How should I know?" I said. "It's not as though I can look out the window and spot landmarks as we fly over them. I've seen nothing but clouds for the past hour."

"Clouds?"

"Well, you saw the kind of rain that was coming down in Chicago."

"No, I mean, you can see clouds out your window?" said Jessie, with a hint of excitement in her voice. "Up close?"

I blinked. "Well, yeah. We're in a jet plane. Didn't they have jet planes in the '50s?"

"Probably, but I've never been on one," said Jessie. "I was made in a factory in Japan, carried on a ship across the Pacific to Long Beach, California, then put on a truck and shipped to the department store in Oyster Bay where your mom bought me. Since then I don't think I've ever been on a long trip anywhere, unless you count when Louise and James moved to Manhattan, and the box of childhood mementos I was in got stuffed into the moving van with everything else. I've always been inside boxes – I've never gotten to _see_ anything."

She was getting that telltale tremble in her voice again, and I wanted to kick myself. Wasn't I ever going to learn? The rule was perfectly simple: If you wanted your animate Jessie doll to remain happy and contented, don't start any conversations with her that might lead to the subject of all those years she spent being neglected by humanity. (Of course, as I was to discover over the course of the next few weeks, there were very few conversations that Jessie couldn't contrive to lead back to that subject. Still, in this case I should probably have seen it coming.)

Fortunately, there was a fairly simple solution this time. "Well, would you like to see something now?" I said. "I could unzip my backpack partway, and then you could peek out through the opening and see out the window."

There was a pause, and then Jessie said hopefully, "Would you mind?"

"Not at all," I said. This wasn't strictly true; actually, I was a little concerned that Mom, who was sitting next to me, would notice what I was doing and request an explanation. (Of course, why she should notice that, when she and Dad had both been asleep for most of the flight, I don't know, but you tend to get a little paranoid when you're trying to keep a secret.) On the other hand, I could always say I was getting out my CD player to listen to; in fact, I could do that anyway, and then I could spend the rest of the flight listening to Lee Ann Womack instead of getting lured into these hazardous conversations with Jessie.

Cautiously, I scooted myself closer to the right armrest, so the mouth of the backpack was as near to the window as I could make it; then I unzipped the backpack and pulled the flap down with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. "How's that?" I whispered.

There was a slight scuffling sound inside the backpack that made me wince and glance quickly at Mom (who didn't seem to have heard anything), and then Jessie's painted eyes poked themselves out of the opening and blinked at the light from the window. "Is that the view you were talking about?" she said. "I can't see any clouds."

"Try looking down," I said.

She looked puzzled, but followed my suggestion – and then her eyes got even wider than they usually were, and she whispered, "Sweet mother of Abraham Lincoln…"

"Not bad, is it?" I said with a smile.

"It's beautiful," Jessie breathed. "It's like the whole Fingerpainted Desert was made of wool, and I was one of the critter-birds flying over it." She laughed. "See, there's Ten-Gallon Mesa – and the little gap right there could be the Old Dried-Up Creek – and…"

She was interrupted by the voice of the head stewardess coming over the intercom. _"We will be beginning our descent in about five minutes. Please return your seats to the upright position and fasten your safety belts."_

"Upright position?" said Jessie, with a frown in her eyes. "What's that about?"

"The seats lean back," I whispered. "For people who want spend the trip to Denver staring at the ceiling."

"Oh," said Jessie. "I didn't think there was enough space between the seats for that."

"There isn't," I said, "but they do it anyway."

Jessie looked baffled, and I laughed softly. "Don't worry about it, Jess," I said. "Just keep an eye on the window. You're not going to want to miss this next part."

* * *

Sure enough, about five minutes later, the plane gave an abrupt lurch downwards, and we plunged into the heart of the cloud. At first, Jessie thought that was the next part, and inquired icily why she ought to be impressed by the inside of a cloud ("It's not as though I've never been cut off from the light before," she noted), but then we came out the other end and she got her first glimpse of Denver, and she forgot all about the Rule of Concealment and let out a tiny, high-pitched scream of delight.

"What was that?" Mom murmured. (She had woken up when the plane started descending; it's a trained reflex, she says, when you've traveled as much as she has.)

I made my face look as innocent as humanly possible. "Dunno," I said. "There was a baby a couple rows back who was crying earlier; maybe that's what it was."

If she had been fully awake, I doubt that explanation would have worked, but Mom's spatial hearing tends to be bad when she's just gotten up. She glanced toward the back of the plane, nodded vaguely, and returned her attention to rousing Dad from his slumber, and I grinned and looked back out the window.

I couldn't blame Jessie for getting excited. I mean, I've taken this trip every summer since I was eight, and it still gets to me when I see that huge metropolis framed by those breathtaking mountains. For a Yodeling Cowgirl who had basically lived her entire life on Long Island and Manhattan, the sight of the Mile-High City from two miles high must have been something like a religious experience.

Still, we did have a secret to keep, so I whispered, "Nice work, Jess. Next time, maybe you could consider pitching it a little higher so the stewardesses can hear you, too."

"I know, I know," Jessie whispered back. "I'm sorry, it's just… well, _look_ at it. How else _can_ you react to something like that?"

"You could yodel," I said facetiously, and then winced as I realized that Jessie was in just the mood to take that suggestion seriously.

She didn't, though – mostly, I think, because she didn't even notice it. "The Colorado Rockies," she whispered. "The country of mountain men and hill people, where elk bugle and cougars prowl – where the sun sparkles down on the snow-fed rivers – where the wind scatters the snow on the crags, and the aspen trees tremble and sway. It's enough to break a poor cowgirl's heart – and you're telling me you _live_ here?"

"_We_ live here," I said.

"Yes, we do," said Mom, overhearing this last comment. "Eight years, come September. And I can't say I'm sorry. Como's been pretty good to us, all things considered."

I smiled and didn't say anything.

"Incidentally, Jake," Mom added, "you should probably get your backpack closed up again. We only have a few minutes before we touch down, and you know what the press on one of these major flights is like three minutes after the plane stops moving. Best to get in as close to the front of the line as possible."

"Yes, ma'am," I said dutifully.

"That goes for you, too, Tom," said Mom, turning to where Dad was still lying inert in his aisle seat. "If you could see your way to resisting the power of gravity long enough to get our bags down from the overhead compartment, we'd be in a much better tactical position."

"Can't do that yet," Dad muttered. "The safety-belt sign's still on."

"What do you think God gave you arms for?" Mom demanded. "I specifically packed that compartment so you'd be able to reach up and grab all the major bags without leaving your seat. Now go on and start earning your keep, or I just might have to drop by the Husband Store in Denver on our way home and trade you in for a better model."

As Dad sighed and reached for the suitcase handles that were hanging down from the edge of the baggage compartment (muttering something about "high-maintenance women" as he did so), I zipped up the flap on the backpack and felt Jessie settle back into her previous crouching position between _Harry Potter_ and Beth's copper Woolworth Buildings. It was strange how much I could tell about what Jessie was feeling just by the position of her body in my backpack; before, she had been curled up in a little ball of resignation, but now she was sitting upright with her arms supporting her, and there was a kind of excited tension about her whole figure, as though all the energy and high spirits that she had lost during her thirty years in Aunt Louise's attic had been pumped back into her by her first sight of Mount Bierstadt.

I sighed, and stared out the window at the rapidly approaching ground. This was always my favorite part of a plane trip: watching the airport grow from an anthill into a full-size building, seeing the grass beside the runway coming into focus as though you were changing the resolution of a microscope, feeling that satisfying _thump!_ as the airplane's wheels made contact with the ground, and then watching the whole airport whoosh past at those ridiculous speeds. It was something of a letdown when the plane slowed to a halt, and when the stewardess made the ritual announcement, _"The captain has turned off the safety-belt sign. Have a good day, and thank you for flying Delta Airlines."_

"So that's it, then?" came Jessie's voice as I got up from my seat and slipped my backpack over my shoulder. "We're here?"

"Yes, we are," I whispered back. "Welcome home, Jessie."


	12. Summer Days, Drifting Away

The only really interesting part of the drive home was when Mom stopped the car to snap a picture of some guy's farm, and his dog came barreling out of its pen and chased our car for the next half-mile. Apart from that, it was just your average drive in semi-rural Colorado – and I think that depressed Jessie, who was expecting to see mountain lions prowling around every tree and cowboys sitting under the road markers singing lonely ballads to the moon. Still, she acknowledged when we got home that it was a lot more to her taste than New York.

And now comes the tricky part of this story: conveying some idea to you people reading this of those first three months or so that Jessie lived in my bedroom in Como. If you don't know about that, the really important part of this story isn't going to make any sense – but I can't very well write out everything that happened between the two of us during those three months. For one thing, my memory's not that good, and, for another, you'd be asleep in five minutes if I tried.

Because, in one sense, nothing really happened during those three months – or, at least, nothing that would seem important if I wrote it down. My mom and my dad and I went about our normal lives, and Jessie did her own thing up in my bedroom, and then at the end of the day I went up to my bedroom and the two of us spent a couple hours getting on each other's nerves, and that was about it. And yet, by the time school started back up again in September, that little cloth cowgirl was as important to me as anyone had ever been. I won't pretend that I understand this; all I know is that it makes writing a royal pain.

The only thing to do, I suppose, is to take three or four little incidents from that time period, string them together, and hope that your imaginations can take care of the rest. I don't know if that's the way Thomas Hardy would do it, but it's the best I can come up with.

* * *

**a**

"You've got a funny little library here, you know that, Jake?" said Jessie, running her finger along the bottom shelf of my bookcase.

I shrugged. "I do my best."

"'_Pudd'n'head Wilson_'..." Jessie read aloud. "'_The Return of the Lone Iguana_'... '_A Sand County Almanac_'... '_The Leveling Wind_'... what's _The Leveling Wind_ about?"

"Political commentary," I said. "And don't give me that look. I only bought it because the author has this thing about baseball, and I thought there might be some good columns about the Rockies in it."

Jessie rolled her eyes. "You're as bad as your mom, you know that?" she said. "If I'd known back in New York that coming to Colorado meant I'd be staying in the same room as a book of political columns, I'd..." She hesitated.

"Yes?" I prompted.

"Well, I'd have thought a lot harder about it, I can tell you that," said Jessie.

Translation: _I'd have come anyway, but, if I admit that, it'll spoil my rhetorical point._ Jessie was so easy to read, it almost made me feel guilty.

"Well," I said, "if it's not living up to your expectations, I can always put you in a parcel and mail you back East. I'm sure Beth would appreciate that."

Jessie shook her head – nonchalantly, I think she meant, but it was a little too vigorous for that. "No, that's okay," she said. "I'm sure I'll be able to survive – unless you plan on asking my opinion of Supreme Court decisions on a regular basis."

"Don't worry," I assured her. "I don't even know the names of half the Supreme Court justices. I know Rehnquist, Scalia, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and that's it – and I only know Ruth Bader Ginsburg because I was old enough to pay vague attention to news reports when she was confirmed, and it's hard to forget a name like Ruth Bader Ginsburg."

Jessie giggled. "Yeah, I believe that," she said.

"Actually, for the longest time, I thought it was 'Darth Vader Ginsburg'," I added. "I kept imagining this guy in a black helmet and judge's robes, looming over the solicitor general and going, 'I find your lack of constitutional support disturbing.'"

Jessie blinked. "Huh?"

I hesitated, then shook my head. "Nothing," I said. "Just one of those space operas that put you out of business."

"Oh."

There was a pause.

"Was it any good?" Jessie asked.

That wasn't something I'd expected her to ask. "What?"

"Well, you know," said Jessie with a shrug, "when you've been forced into oblivion by something, you hope that it'll at least be something important. That was the worst part of what happened to _Woody's Roundup_: not just that we got kicked off the air, but that we got kicked off the air for something as stupid as _Captain Cal and Volnok_. So if I knew that, somewhere, there was a space show that was actually worth watching..." She shrugged. "I don't know, it just might make me feel a little better about everything else that's happened over the years."

When she put it like that, it gave me a strong incentive to praise the movie – not that I needed much incentive, since we in the Peters household have always been suckers for the _Star Wars_ movies. (Mom and Dad, according to family legend, had their first kiss at a drive-in showing of _The Empire Strikes Back_, just as the Millennium Falcon was finally making the jump to light-speed.)

"Tell you what," I said. "Why don't we go down to the den, and I'll pop it into the VCR and show it to you? If you're going to be living in the 21st century, you ought to know something about its major cultural reference points."

Jessie smiled. "I'd like that."

"Okay, then." I poked my head out the door and shouted down the hallway. "Mom? If it's okay with you, I'm going down to the den to spend a couple hours on the Death Star."

"That's fine," Mom called back.

"Thanks."

I scooped Jessie under my arm and headed for the stairs.

* * *

**b**

"Well, ain't you the most beautiful thing?" Jessie cooed, stroking Gamaliel's soft fur through the wire mesh of his cage. "I reckon all the critters would be embarrassed to show their faces if you showed up in Cactus Gulch."

I winced, and glanced over my shoulder to make sure we were still alone in the tent. It was just possible that Jessie, in her animal-loving ecstasy, had forgotten that we were in a public place, and the last thing I needed was to try and explain to Mrs. Bialostosky why an antique cowgirl doll was making love to one of her prize Angora rabbits.

I hadn't even known that Jessie was planning on coming to the Park County Fair until I heard her whispering to me from the trunk of the car while we were driving through Red Hill Pass. Apparently she had been getting a little stir-crazy being stuck in my bedroom for a month, so she had snuck out of my window and down the drain-pipe while Mom was getting her camera equipment together. (Mom always takes the pictures for the annual _Republican_ article covering the Park County Fair, which is always written by a friend of hers named Andrea Albertins; the standard joke among the _Republican_ staff is that "Andy and Dana are two of the four H's all by themselves".) And that meant, of course, that I had to stick to her like glue once we got to the fair, since otherwise she might have done her go-limp-when-people-are-around trick and been carried off by some child whose respect for other people's property had been weakened by excessive cotton-candy consumption – and I could just imagine what Beth would have to say about that.

This made for an awkward situation, because I don't generally spend much time looking at the animals at the fair (the midway's more my speed), and Jessie didn't seem to want to do anything else. I'd already figured out, based on things she'd said, that the original Jessie in the TV show had had a special relationship with the "critters" in her Old-West town, but I hadn't realized that that made my Jessie such a small-animals fanatic.

"Jess?" I whispered. "Maybe we could think about moving on now?"

Jessie turned to me and made a little moue with her plastic lips. "Oh, come on, Jake," she said. "My first real breath of fresh air in forty years, and you're trying to rush me?"

"The guilt card's not going to work today, Jessie," I said sternly. "This is my day out as much as yours; if you think I'm going to spend the next three hours watching you make googly-eyes at the local livestock, you've got another think coming."

My alpha-male assertiveness had its intended effect, more or less. Jessie didn't exactly lower her eyes submissively and murmur, "My author and disposer, what thou bidd'st unargued I obey," but she did let out an annoyed sigh and say, "Fine. Give me five more minutes, and then we'll go."

So five more minutes we spent: Jessie cooing at Gamaliel and his brethren, me feigning an intense interest in the breeding of chickens (and wondering, every time I breathed in, just where Jessie got her definition of _fresh air_ from). Then, at last, she agreed to leave the barn, and the two of us headed out to the midway.

Of course, that didn't mean that my worries were over. I couldn't exactly carry Jessie around (after all, a guy's got his reputation to think of); instead, she had to follow me on foot, and, for Jessie, that meant a lot of dodging behind bushes and under hot-dog stands so as to avoid being seen by any of the two hundred or so people at the Park County Fair that afternoon. And I, of course, had to keep an eye on her without actually looking in her direction, so I spent a lot of time rolling my eyes in directions precisely opposite to where my head was turned. By the time we got to the Scrambler, my eye sockets were throbbing like nobody's business.

I handed my three tickets to the conductor (or whatever you call the guy who turns the ride on and off) and walked over to the basket at the opposite end of the ride from the midway. As I climbed into the seat and latched myself in, Jessie emerged from behind the fence and leaped in beside me.

"Oh, boy!" she said, smiling almost as broadly and falsely as she did when she was frozen. "So _this_ is what you had in mind: getting inside a scrap-metal pinyon tree and letting it spin you round and round for a few minutes! Well, I sure am glad you pulled me away from those rabbits so I could come join in the excitement!"

It is a mark of weakness to respond to your hecklers. I maintained a dignified silence, and waited for the Scrambler to start scrambling.

And, in about a minute and a half (after the conductor had made his trip round the machine to make sure everyone was properly buckled in, which caused Jessie to squeeze herself between my buttock and the metal so he wouldn't see her), it did. Slowly at first, the way carnival rides do, but after a few seconds it started picking up speed, and in about half a minute it was whipping the two of us around as briskly as anyone could have wished.

That seemed to include Jessie. When the Scrambler got up to full speed, she forgot all her sarcasm of two minutes before, and screamed with delight at every lurch of the basket. After a minute or so, she got brave enough to stick her head out of the basket and watch the world whirling around her – on the theory, I guess, that the only people who would be close enough to see her would be the people in the other baskets, and that they wouldn't exactly be paying close attention to what was going on in the other baskets. (Personally, what worried me was the possibility that her hat would blow off and that I would have to go chase it across the fairgrounds. Amazingly enough, that didn't happen, despite the wind that the ride whipped up around us. They must have had some really sturdy red felt back in the Fifties.)

When the ride stopped, Jessie sank down into the seat, breathing heavily. "Well, scald my horses," she gasped. "Jake, I'm sorry I made such a fuss about coming over here. I never..."

She broke off then, since the conductor had come round to unlatch us and she had to hide and freeze again, and when he left I cut her off before she could start again. "Don't worry about it, Jess," I said. "No hard feelings. In fact, just to prove that point... do _Woody's Roundup_ toys eat?"

Jessie hesitated. "I'm not sure," she said. "I've never done it, but that doesn't mean I can't – and I know I can sleep, even though I don't need to, so I reckon I can probably eat, too."

"Okay, then," I said, glancing at a nearby elephant-ear stand. "Wait for me behind the bench next to the restrooms, and I'll be over in a few minutes with the best introduction to the world of taste that a cowgirl doll could ask for."

* * *

**c**

"Can you believe there are still people driving in this weather?" I said, staring out my window at a passing train of SUVs. "Here it's nine-thirty at night, in the middle of one of the worst summer thunderstorms in Colorado history, and still these people think there's somewhere they have to be other than their homes. People are nuts."

As if to underline my point, the sky lit up with another flash of lightning, and a long, drawn-out thunderclap rumbled overhead like a hungry giant's stomach. I sighed, shook my head, and turned back to my bed.

What I saw there surprised me more than any number of crazy motorists. Jessie, who ordinarily spent the night on top of my dresser (since it provided a good view of my window, and she liked to fall asleep gazing out at the Rocky Mountain skyline), was lying curled up in my comforter, looking just as timid and forlorn as her plastic eyes would allow.

"Something the matter, Jessie?" I said.

Jessie licked her lips. "I was just wondering," she said, "if I... that is, if you... I mean, I... could I sleep with you tonight?"

I blinked, and almost asked why (which would have been pretty dense of me, but then I've never been known as the world's most perceptive guy), but just then another thunderclap sounded, and I caught on. "You don't like thunderstorms?"

Jessie shook her head. "No Jessie does," she said. "That's part of our original's character profile; it's even in one of the episodes. And it's worse for me, since I was in that attic all those years. It's bad enough being shut up in a box and never being played with, but when it's storming... when the wind is howling through the attic walls, and raindrops are hitting the roof above you like bullets from One-Eyed Jack's six-shooter, and..." She shuddered, and didn't say anything more.

She'd said enough, though. I've never really minded bad weather myself (not so long as I don't have to be out in it, anyway), but I did have a severe nyctophobic phase when I was five, so I had a pretty good idea how Jessie was feeling. "Right, okay," I said.

"You don't mind, do you?" said Jessie.

"No, of course not," I said. "I just hope you're not one of those people who squirm a lot when they sleep. Getting kicked in the ribs with a tiny plastic boot wasn't how I planned on spending the night."

"Don't worry," said Jessie. "We freeze up when we sleep, the same as when people are around. If we didn't, someone would have found out about us before you and Beth did."

Thus reassured, I pulled back the covers and slid in next to her, and she snuggled up against my chest as I pulled the comforter back over us. The way the tension seemed to seep out of her body was amazing: it was as though the touch of a human was enough to dispel all her fears. She didn't flinch or tremble again that night, and only once did she say anything: just before she drifted off (if you can call it drifting off when it freezes a person's eyes wide open), she whispered, "You're a nice boy, Jake."

I smiled softly, and ran a finger through the red yarn of her hair. "And you're a nice girl, Jess," I said.

She didn't reply, and I could feel the stiffness in her body indicating that she had left the land of the living. I sighed, rolled over, and closed my eyes, and in a few minutes had joined her in sleep.

* * *

So that was our summer. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing especially profound: just a boy and a toy cowgirl learning to live with one another. Certainly, there was nothing that prepared us for what was going to happen in September.


	13. Don't You Want Me, Baby?

It happened on Labor Day. My parents and I had gone (without Jessie, for a change) to a little park just outside Denver: some friends of my dad's named Kindschi had invited us out for a picnic if the weather didn't turn nasty. (At elevation 5,000 feet, you never take nice weather for granted.) Fortunately, the gods decided to be agreeable, and the day was not only clear but positively gorgeous: the sun was sparkling on the lake, the breeze was crisp without being bone-chilling, and the trees were at that wonderful stage where they've changed colors just a little bit, on the edges, so that you have this basically green tree with little red and yellow highlights, like something out of a Monet painting. (September's my favorite month, in case you couldn't tell.)

We got there precisely at four o'clock as agreed upon – which of course meant that the Kindschis, who have never been on time to anything as long as we've known them, weren't there. So after setting up our half of the food (drinks, potato salad, and Mom's famous chocolate pie) on one of the picnic tables, we each wandered off to find some way of killing a quarter-hour or so. I don't know where Dad and Mom went (though, in Mom's case, I'd lay even odds that it had something to do with photographing the lake), but I headed over to the swing-set at the eastern edge of the park.

I had just taken my position on my favorite of the swings (the second one from the right, which has a marginally deeper hole worn beneath it than the others) when I noticed a tiny rod of green plastic sticking out of the dirt by my feet. Puzzled, I dug around it a bit with the toe of my sneaker, and discovered that it was the lightsaber of a small Qui-Gon Jinn action figure.

At first, I didn't think much of it. This was September of 1999, after all: for the past three months, you'd barely been able to throw a rock without hitting some kind of licensed _Phantom Menace _merchandise. But then, after I'd kicked it aside and gotten the swing going, I started thinking about how tickled Jessie would be if I brought it home for her. (After our miniature _Star Wars _festival back in June, she had, of course, demanded that I take her along when I went to see Episode I, and, unlike me, she had adored the film. For one thing, it was her first time in a real movie theater, and for another – give Lucas credit – the story might have been insipid, but the landscapes were glorious. And we all knew what a sucker Jessie was for glorious landscapes.)

I wasn't given much time to think about it, since the Kindschis pulled into the parking lot about a minute after the thought first occurred to me, and Dad reappeared by the picnic table, waving me over. Hastily, I jumped off the swing, grabbed Qui-Gon and stuffed him into my pocket, and headed over to join the party.

* * *

Jessie was sitting on my bed waiting for me when I got home. "So how'd it go?" she said, sounding relatively indifferent for a change.

"Pretty much the way I said it would," I said. "Dad and Mr. Kindschi got to arguing about the theory of evolution, and the rest of us just sat there and chewed for half an hour."

"Mm," said Jessie. "Did you remember to bring me back a piece of your mom's pie?"

"I did," I said. "And that's not the only thing I brought back. I found a little present for you while I was wandering around the park."

Jessie looked up, interested. "A present?" she said. "What kind of a present?"

I grinned, reached into my pocket, and pulled out Qui-Gon. "Just a little memento of your new favorite movie," I said. "I know it loses something when you've got a scrunched-up little plastic face instead of the real Liam Neeson, but..."

I trailed off. Knowing Jessie the way I did, I'd been figuring that she would do one of two things when I showed her the toy: either she would give an excited squeal and lunge for it, or she would roll her eyes contemptuously and ask me if I really expected her to be impressed by that. What I hadn't at all expected was for her to stare at that silly little action figure with something that, if it wasn't fear, looked an awful lot like it.

"Jess?" I said uncertainly. "What's wrong?"

Jessie was silent for a long moment; then she swallowed and said, "May I have my pie now, please?"

I was baffled, but I obediently reached into my other pocket and pulled out a plastic fork wrapped in Saran Wrap, on which's far-right tine sat a slightly smushed crumb of chocolate pie. (You're wondering how I managed to arrange that without my parents or the Kindschis noticing? Sorry, but I can't reveal all my secrets.) I held it out to Jessie, and she snatched it from me almost violently, tore off the plastic, and stuck the tine as far in her mouth as it would go (which, given the size of her mouth, wasn't really that far). It would have been a hilarious picture, if she hadn't looked so deadly serious.

I tried again. "Jessie, what's wrong?"

Jessie took the fork out of her mouth and looked up at me with a shaky smile. "Wrong?" she said. "Why should anything be wrong? You found a _Star Wars_ toy in the park, and you brought it home to me. What's wrong with that?"

She had me there, of course. "Well, nothing that I know of, but..."

"Okay, then," said Jessie. "Just put Mr. Jinn right here next to me... yeah, that's good. And now you can take this fork back downstairs, and compliment your mom for me on her baking skills."

"My mom doesn't know you exist," I pointed out.

"Well, you can still take the fork down, can't you?"

I considered pointing out that it might be safer just to dump it in my own wastebasket, but something in Jessie's tone told me that this wasn't an issue of logic. I took the fork and headed downstairs, leaving Jessie looking at her new plastic Jedi master as though she thought it might do to her what Darth Maul did to its original.

* * *

"Hello, Jake," said Mom, looking up from her computer. "What brings you down here?"

"Oh, I dunno," I said, wandering in a carefully aimless way towards the garbage disposal. "Just restless, I guess."

"Well, you shouldn't be," said Mom, mock-stern. "You're supposed to be perfectly content with resting all day today. Why do you think it's called Labor Day?"

I ignored her, and slipped the fork into the trash. Then, feeling that I ought to at least sort of do the other thing Jessie had proposed, I said, "The pie was good today, by the way."

"I know," said Mom. "I was surprised. I could have sworn that butter was rancid, even though your father insisted..." She trailed off, and looked up quizzically at the ceiling. "What's that noise?"

I listened. Yes, there was some sort of funny noise coming from upstairs – from my room, in fact. A dull, repeated thud that sounded suspiciously like the impact of plastic with wood.

"Beats me," I said, though I had a feeling it was nothing good. "Should I go up and check?"

"You might as well," said Mom. "Seeing as how you have this extraordinary notion that you ought to be doing something on the day we celebrate people who do things."

I rolled my eyes, and headed for the stairway. So long as Mom could see me, I walked at an ordinary rate, as though I didn't much care what was making the noise upstairs; once I was out of her line of vision, though, I darted like a leopard up the stairs and down the hallway, and burst into my room without warning so Jessie didn't have time to hide the evidence of whatever she was doing.

Not that she looked as though she might try. Tears gleaming on her face, she was holding the Qui-Gon figure by the lightsaber and whacking it with all her might against the headboard of my bed. "No, no, no!" she shouted. "Don't do this to me, you stupid space toy!"

"Jessie!" I said, startled.

"He won't come back!" Jessie wailed. "He won't come back, and it's my fault; it's all my fault! Just like the Prospector said!" And she dropped Qui-Gon and collapsed onto the bed, sobbing.

I stepped gently forward, sat down on the bed next to her, and stroked her hair for about half a minute, as various facts clicked into place in my mind.

"Jessie," I said softly, when she'd calmed down enough to hear me, "it's not just _Woody's Roundup_ toys, is it?"

Miserably, Jessie shook her head.


	14. And Don't You Make Any Noise

I got what was left of the story out of her pretty quickly after that. Apparently _all_ toys are alive, and have been ever since Adam first whittled a top for Cain. They just haven't let us know, because of what's called the "Rule of Concealment".

Of course, I'd already heard that phrase from the Prospector (though Jessie didn't know that), but I didn't know what it meant until she told me. It seems that toys are born (or made, or however you want to put it) with this instinctive hunger for kids to lavish imagination on them, and, since you can put more imagination into a lifeless object than you can into another person, feigned inanimacy is their best bet.

But that makes it sound like it's something every toy plans individually, and could stop doing at any moment. It's not like that at all. Even a toy who didn't know that he was a toy, or that humans were humans, would still instinctively snap into lifelessness mode when a human was around. It's the deepest, most ineradicable impulse in a plaything's heart.

Which isn't to say that Jessie's the only toy who's ever broken it. Every so often, apparently, a toy will reveal himself to a particular human – but only one human, only for a short time, and only in the gravest of emergencies. ("The Nutcracker's the classic example," said Jessie, which startled me a little bit; I'd been in a school performance of _The Nutcracker_ in third grade, and I'd never dreamed that I was helping enact the story of my dinosaur models' greatest culture hero.) If they do anything more than that, they're in trouble.

What kind of trouble, you ask? Well, because there's such a barrier between toy life and human life, the more time you spend in one, the less you're able to participate in the other. In other words, if a toy (let's call him Ken) were to go on television and reveal himself to the world, he'd find, once the media furor died down and he stopped getting invited to the White House, that other toys no longer came to life in his presence – not because they didn't want to, but because you just can't have it both ways. Either you're a toy living among toys, or you're a human living among humans. Never both.

When Jessie had told me all this, I sat back on the bed and spent a long moment processing the implications. "So, when I left the room just now," I said, "you were hoping that Qui-Gon here would come out of his trance and get acquainted with you?"

Jessie nodded dolefully. "But he didn't," she said. "And he never will, now. No toy's ever going to talk to me again – not even the ones I used to know. Your mom's Chatty Cathy used to be the best friend I had in the world; now she couldn't give me the time of day. Even if I found the Prospector again..." She broke down again at that point, and I couldn't blame her. If I had somehow managed to erect a glass wall between me and the human race, I'd probably feel the same way.

Still, it wasn't as though she was completely alone. I tried to point this out to her, but she just shook her head. "No, Jake, you don't understand," she said. "I love you, and I love Beth –" (she listed the two of us equally, but the tone of her voice left no doubt as to which she preferred) "– but it's not the same. You've got to have someone of your own kind to talk to, or..." She took a deep breath, and tried to force a smile. "Still, I guess I shouldn't complain. It's better than the last thirty years have been for me, anyway."

But she couldn't fool me. I'd seen the look in her eyes when she thought about the loneliness that was in store for her; I knew that she'd willingly have jumped back into the Riley attic for another thirty years if it would undo the mess she'd made. But, clearly, that wasn't an option.

But did it have to be? I thought for a moment. "What if there was some other toy who had revealed himself to humans?" I said. "Could you talk to him?"

Jessie stared up at me; apparently that had never crossed her mind. "Well... yeah, sure, I guess," she said. "But how could there be? You'd have to find another toy who was packed away for as long as I was, and then got tricked the same way I did when he finally came out. The odds against there being two of us..."

"Are astronomical, I know," I said. "I wasn't saying that I knew where I could find one. I was just saying, _if_ I could find one, would that do the trick for you?"

Jessie took a deep breath. "Jake, if you could find someone else who had broken the Rule of Concealment, I'd probably be the happiest toy in the U.S.A.," she said, and sounded as though she meant it. "But you can't, so what's the good in talking about it?"

I nodded. "Okay, fair enough," I said. "So how did you guys come to be alive, anyway?"

So Jessie related the various Legends of the First Toy to me, and I raised various philosophical objections to them, and neither of us mentioned the possibility of another toy exile for the rest of the evening. Jessie, of course, didn't want to talk about it, because she knew it would only depress her to think about something she couldn't have – and, of course, I wasn't about to raise the question again, since that might give Jessie some hint of what I was planning.

The past few months had really messed me up, I thought. Back when Jessie and I had first met, I had loudly protested whenever she had made me do something crazy like impersonating a CIA operative or stealing a little girl's Prospector doll. Yet here I was now, getting ready to do something crazier than everything else I'd ever done put together, and Jessie wasn't even expecting it. I was just doing it because I knew it would make her happy.

Grumpy was right, guys. Never get involved with women. The dang creatures corrupt you even when they're not trying.


	15. A Little Help from My Friends

Four days later…

"Good God in Heaven, what's happened to the team I took to State last May?" Coach Reed barked, glaring down from his perch at the poolside like a displeased god. "I could get more hustle out of your little sisters. I expected you to let yourself decay over the summer, but I never dreamed it was going to be this bad!"

"Have I mentioned how much I missed you the last three months, Coach?" said one of my teammates glibly.

"If you're talking to me, Parker, you're wasting oxygen," Coach shot back. "Come on, boys, let's see you get control of this water instead of just floating on it like dead leaves!"

Just another Friday for the Dutchendorf High Swim Team.

Not that I'm complaining. I've been part of the team since its inception, and I don't think anything short of a meteor hitting the pool could get me off it. I don't know what it is about me and water; maybe Mom was scared by a fish while she was pregnant with me. Whatever, there's something about being surrounded by good, clean H2O that puts me at peace with the world in no time flat. As I swam vigorous laps around the pool that afternoon, I found myself, for the first time since we left New York, almost forgetting about the red-haired problem in my bedroom.

Not completely, of course. After three months of devoting large sectors of my brain to doing nothing but worry about what Jessie was up to, I was probably incapable of completely forgetting about her. (Which is fair, since that's probably how my parents felt about me after I had been around for three or four months.) Plus, of course, there was that other thing that I had to remember to take care of after practice, and that was related to Jessie, so, to that extent, I was thinking about her. For the most part, though, the harder I breaststroked, the less my whole weird situation preyed on my mind, and for that I was grateful.

* * *

I think my relief must have had some positive effect on my swimming skills, since Coach singled me out for a rare piece of praise during our post-practice gathering in the locker room. "Peters, you didn't embarrass me as badly as the rest of these clowns out there," were his exact words, I believe. "Got any secrets you can impart to them?"

I shrugged. "Just managed to stay focused, I guess," I said, partly because it was a nice, safe summary of the truth, and partly because it happens to be Coach's solution for everything. I think he believes that Communism failed because Mikhail Gorbachev didn't stay focused.

"_That's_ it!" Coach exclaimed, as though I'd given him a divine revelation. "_That's_ what was missing from all you guys' flailings back there! Your brains were all so full of the gunk they'd picked up over the summer, you couldn't concentrate them on any one thing!"

"Gunk?" Parker commented softly, with a sly smile. "You Manichee, you."

Unfortunately for him, Coach overheard him. "Oh, that's how it is, is it?" he said, his eyes narrowing. "I should have guessed. Now, listen here, Parker, I've got nothing against my boys being interested in the female sex. I've got a nice specimen at home myself, and I know the good it does me. But, if you want to stay on my team, you'd better make darn sure that that interest – or any other interest, for that matter – doesn't slow you down in the pool. Remember that, all of you!" he added, his eyes swiveling around to cover the whole team. "You've got to _stay balanced!_ If you're letting your emotions run your body, you're no better than a bunch of apes splashing around in a lagoon somewhere. You've got minds for a reason, and I expect you to use them!"

That little lecture on the value of sophrosyne might have been more effective if Coach hadn't been shouting it in our faces. Still, it was something to think about, I suppose.

But I had other things that I was thinking about, myself. As the others gathered up their clothes and dispersed, I zeroed in on Tim Hennegan, a short, wiry eighth-grader who could jet through the pool like a squid when he felt like it. That was why he was still on the team after an incident the previous October, when the police had showed up at his house with a search warrant and had found about a hundred dollars' worth of stolen goods from various Denver stores hidden in his desk. Most of it was completely worthless (carved elk from tourist-trap stores, that kind of thing), and Tim told the judge that he had only kept them as trophies: that it was the sheer sport of breaking into places, not any kind of greed for gain, that had inspired him to do it. The judge hadn't been impressed by this defense, but he did have some hometown patriotism, and, when Coach Reed and Principal Haywood explained to him that Tim was a necessary component of our team's chances to make it to State, he agreed to give him the minimum sentence: six months in juvenile detention, followed by a year's probation, plus the return of all the swag and a fine. (I forget how much the fine was, although Coach did make me contribute a portion of it.) Tim, who's actually a pretty good guy apart from his odd ideas about recreation, evidently behaved pretty well about the whole thing; anyway, he was out of the pen by April 6, and we managed to make the State championships after all. (We lost, of course, but that wasn't his fault; those Aspen kids are fast.)

Tim looked up as I came over. "Hey, Peters," he said. "How was your summer?"

I sighed. "Complicated."

Tim nodded. "Mine, too. You should have heard Elsie when she found out that I couldn't leave the Denver area without my probation officer's consent; she'd had her heart set on going to see this _Feet of Flames _production in Colorado Springs for months, and now her rotten, criminal brother was messing everything up."

"Mm," I said vaguely, wishing that I had had his trouble; if I hadn't been allowed to leave the Denver area all summer, my life would have been a heck of a lot simpler – and Jessie probably would have been happier, too. (On the other hand, Beth would really have missed me, so maybe it was worth it.) "So what did you do?"

"Oh, she went with Dad while Mom and I stayed home," said Tim. "Just as well, really; neither of us are exactly huge Michael Flatley fans, and it definitely would have broken the mood if we'd burst out laughing during the resurrection scene."

"Great, great," I said. "Listen, the reason I wanted to talk to you…"

"Yeah?"

I took a deep breath. "Could you tell me how to break into Nothern's Toy Shop in Commerce City?"

* * *

Tim looked at me as though I'd gone insane. "Peters, what are you trying to do to me?" he said. "Do you know what they do to repeat offenders in this state?"

"I'm not asking _you_ to break in," I said. "I'm just looking for information. I mean, you've done Nothern's before, right?"

"Oh, sure," said Tim. "Easiest thing in the world. I mean, it's hardly Gitmo."

"Okay, then," I said. "Just give me some pointers."

Tim gave me a long, thoughtful look. "You know, this team will never stop amazing me," he said. "Of all the people on it that I would never have pegged as a fellow marauder, Jake Peters would have been right at the top of the list."

"I'm not doing this for thrills, Tim," I snapped. (Maybe a little more harshly than I intended, since his comment made me uncomfortably aware of just how lax my moral standards had become in a mere four months.)

"Then why are you doing it?"

I'd expected him to ask that, and I had an answer – a basically truthful answer, in fact – all planned. Still, it took some effort to actually say it. "Um… well, you see, there's this girl."

Tim's eyes widened. "Oh-_ho!_" he said, grinning broadly. "So you were getting your gunk on over the summer, too!"

"Not exactly," I said. "Trust me, it would take too long to explain. Anyway, I've already impersonated a Secret Service agent for her sake, so…" I trailed off, as an expression of great awe and respect passed over Tim's face.

"Whoa," he said. "And here I thought I was hot stuff just because I'd snatched a few bobble-head toys. Jake, if you ever form a revolutionary army and seize the State Capitol, just remember that I always believed in you, okay?"

"Yeah, whatever," I said. "So how about those pointers?"

"Well, that depends," said Tim. "What exactly does this girl want you to pinch from Nothern's?"

"No, no." I shook my head vehemently. "I'm not stealing anything. I just need to get inside after everyone who works there has left for the day."

"Why?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

Tim gave me a long look, but I didn't flinch. After all, I was pretty sure it was true.

"I helped pay your fine, you know," I reminded him.

There was a moment's silence.

"Okay, fine," Tim said at last. "Tell you what: after school's over, I'll write out a plan on the back of my old class schedule and give it to you. But you can't _ever_ let this get back to Judge Waldron, all right?"

I laughed hollowly. "Trust me, Tim," I said, "if you're looking for someone with experience at keeping secrets, Jake Peters is your man."

* * *

"What was that paper that Tim Hennegan gave you just now?" Mom asked as I climbed into the car.

"A class schedule," I said.

"Oh." Mom raised an eyebrow. "I would have thought you already had one of those."

"Not like this one."

"Ah."

And that was that. For someone who hangs out with reporters so much, my mom's a remarkably uninquisitive person. (Truth be told, I think that's partly _because_ she hangs out with reporters so much. The last thing she wants is to be mistaken for one of her co-workers on the _Republican_.)

She started the car, and we drove in silence for a few miles. Then, as though it had just occurred to me, I said, "Say, Mom, I was thinking: we haven't been on the Safari in a while, have we?"


	16. I Go Out Walking after Midnight

"The Safari?" said Jessie. "What's that?"

"The ABC Balloon Safari," I said. "There's this pressure-washer store up in Commerce City that sells hot-air-balloon tours of Denver and the surrounding countryside. We used to take it all the time when I was younger, but we've gotten out of the habit lately." I shrugged. "I don't know, I just thought it would be a good, nostalgic thing to do. Anyway, Mom's made arrangements for us to go next Saturday."

Jessie sighed. "Well, if that ain't the most terrific thing I ever heard," she said. "Just soaring over the mountains, with nothing but air and straw between you and God's own homeland." She shot a plaintive look at me. "You're sure you can't figure a way to take me along?"

"Positive," I said firmly. "There's no reason for me to take a backpack, and no place to hide a cowgirl doll in the basket."

"You could just carry me," said Jessie, her tone suggesting that she knew this was a long shot but she was determined to try it anyway.

"Jessie," I said patiently, "if I start acting too attached to some antique toy cowgirl from my mom's childhood, people are going to get suspicious. It looked weird enough when Beth talked Aunt Louise into giving you to me. Now, unless you want to go whole hog and make a public announcement that you're alive…"

Jessie shook her head. "No, I couldn't do that," she said. "It wouldn't be fair to the others."

"Okay, then," I said. "This time, you stay home. You can't beat logic."

And Jessie couldn't. She made her best lost-puppy attempt, but in the end she grudgingly admitted that the outrageous injustice of life was on my side this time, and settled down to sulk for the next eight days.

I couldn't help smiling. The little droveress had no idea what I was getting ready for her.

* * *

What I had told Jessie, and Mom, was true as far as it went. (Actually, I was getting pretty good at "true as far as it went"; if I had been a 16th-century Jesuit faced with the Bloody Question, I could probably have equivocated my way out of the courtroom with reasonable aplomb.) As our balloonist – Sam was his name – took us up over the South Platte River, I felt that same thrill that I had gotten as a nine-year-old: that sense of, _Hey, I can see my house from here! Hey, wow, I can see the _governor's_ house from here!_

But, of course, that wasn't the whole story. I hadn't suggested this outing to Mom because I'd had a sudden, urgent need to feel nine years old again; I'd suggested it because, whenever we go on the Safari, we always make an all-day trip out of it. It's Commerce City, after all, and, if there's one thing my mom loves to do (besides take pictures of anything that will stand still long enough), it's shop. A four-hour wander through every mercantile depot that downtown CC offers, from parfumeries to antiques stores to Microsoft outlets, is an essential part of the ritual for her. And, of course, by the time she gets done, it's about 9 p.m., so we always make a point of reserving a room at a Commerce City hotel so we can stay there overnight and come back in the morning. Not a really expensive hotel, of course; just this modest little Holiday Inn on the outskirts of the city. A modest little Holiday Inn that just happens to be only two blocks down the street from Nothern's Toy Shop.

Isn't it wonderful how things work out sometimes?

* * *

I woke up around midnight, just the way I'd told myself I would. It's a little trick I've perfected as an adaptation to the ungodly hours that Coach Reed expects us to keep: for an hour or two before you go to bed, you just keep reminding yourself at regular intervals, "Six o'clock" (or whatever), and, come six o'clock the next morning, you're – okay, not necessarily up and raring to go, but conscious, anyway. Maybe it's a case of mind-body synchronicity, or something; all I know is that, since I worked it out, I've never had to worry about running into the pool area at the last minute and having maybe six seconds to change.

I sat up in the rollaway and looked around. Mom and Dad were both fast asleep; I waited for one of Mom's trademark whistling snores, and heard it. Good. With any luck, they were out cold enough that I wouldn't disturb them by getting out of the rollaway. (Of course, with the squeaky springs those things usually have, you can never be 100% sure about something like that. Still, that was the risk I had to take.)

Carefully, I eased out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom, where I exchanged my pajamas for the clothes I'd been wearing during the day. Then I did a quick checklist. Room key? Check. Tim's class schedule/storebreaker guidelines? Check. No more money than I needed, and no valuables whatsoever, so I didn't attract unnecessary attention from muggers? Check. Everything in place – yet, somehow, I had the feeling I was forgetting something.

Oh. Right. Shoes.

I slipped those on, and then snuck back out into the hotel room proper, and from there out into the hallway. The elevator was at the end of the second corridor to the left, but I didn't trust it; for all I knew, hotels kept logs of how many trips their elevators took during any given 24-hour period. I elected for the stairway instead, which had the added advantage that it opened directly out onto the parking lot; thus, the night clerk wouldn't have to know that I had been out that night.

I won't pretend I was even remotely comfortable about this. Not the technical details; I had spent two weeks researching and planning this, and, assuming Tim hadn't let me down on the Nothern's front, I was set for any eventuality. And I was fairly secure in my legal and moral position; after all, I was intending to remunerate them – and it's only shoplifting if _you_ take the thing out, right?

But, still, there was something about the mere fact of sneaking into a toy store in the dead of night that decided me: after I got back home, Jessie was on her own. No more impersonating CIA guys, no more smuggling her into fairgrounds, and definitely no more midnight raids on other people's businesses; if Jessie wanted something, and I couldn't achieve it without stretching my own personal Rule of Concealment beyond reasonable bounds, she would just have to get it herself.

Of course, I'd made resolutions like that before, and all it had taken was one winsome look from those acrylic baby blues to send them soaring out the window. I had a feeling, though, that I was going to stick to this one.

Right now, though, I had a job to do. I took a deep breath, summoned all my resolution, and headed down the sidewalk to Nothern's Toys.


	17. Ain't Too Proud to Beg

I have no intention of telling you how I got into the toy store. For one thing, I don't want to give anyone any ideas; for another, if you really care about how to break into Nothern's of Denver, you probably live around here and know Tim Hennegan by sight, so you can just ask him what the trick is. Don't mention my name.

Anyway, I got in – and, let me tell you, it's a creepy place late at night. It's not one of those bright, cheerful, modern stores like Toys 'R' Us; it's an old family business that's been around since the 1930s, and the Notherns are very proud that they've never altered the building except once when the plumbing needed fixing. It's full of small, narrow aisles with wooden shelves heaped with dolls – which doesn't sound so bad, and generally isn't in full daylight, but at half past midnight, with the wind howling outside and the floorboards creaking underneath your feet, it's the eeriest thing you can imagine. You feel like all the dolls are watching you with their little glass eyes, wondering what you're doing there – and it doesn't help any when you happen to know that that could be literally true.

Fortunately, my plan didn't require me to walk down any of those aisles. All I had to do was slip behind the counter and find the little button on the cash register that activated the intercom. And, of course, work up the nerve to give the little speech I had prepared.

That was the tricky part. You can't realize, until you've actually tried, just how hard it is to open your mouth and start making impassioned pleas to a store that any normal observer would describe as empty. It took me maybe three whole minutes, and I don't know how many swallows, before I managed to get out my first three words: "Attention, Nothern's merchandise."

* * *

Physically, nothing happened. I hadn't really expected it to; toys must be equipped to handle sudden surprises like that, and, anyway, a bunch of them were probably still asleep (unless my voice had just woken them up, which was likely enough; that was a loud intercom). But, emotionally, now that I'd started talking to a bunch of apparently lifeless effigies, it suddenly seemed a lot easier to continue.

"That's right, you on the shelves," I said. "I know you're alive. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell anybody – well, except my cousin in New York City, but she basically knows already, so that doesn't count."

I took a deep breath. "You're probably wondering how I found out about you guys. Well, it's a long story, but the short version is, there's this vintage cowgirl from the '50s who broke your Rule of Concealment a few months ago and revealed herself to my cousin and me. She's up in my bedroom in Como right now – probably fast asleep, and dreaming about whatever it is your kind do dream about.

"And she's the reason I'm here right now," I went on, looking around the store to see if I was getting any reaction yet. "A lot of you are probably thinking, 'Boy, she must really be a rotten little twerp, breaking the most important rule there is.' But it's not like that at all. What Jessie did was perfectly reasonable, given what she knew and what she didn't. It wasn't her fault that she'd been cut off from human society for thirty years, and then dropped into the middle of a situation that's probably unique in the history of the world. But now she has to live with the consequences anyway.

"You all know what those consequences are. For all practical purposes, she's part of our world now, so she can't be part of yours anymore – but she's still one of you. And she's lonely. She tries to pretend she isn't, but she is. And she's only going to get lonelier as time goes by – unless she can find someone else who's done the same stupid thing she did.

"Now, I know you don't know this girl from Raggedy Ann. And I know that what I'm about to say is going to sound like the craziest, most presumptuous thing you've ever heard. But I broke into this store tonight, knowing full well that I was risking being caught by the police and thrown into jail or an insane asylum, because I thought there was just a chance that one of you might respond to it anyway. So I put it to you, goods and surplus of Nothern's Toys: are any of you willing, here and now, to break the Rule of Concealment, show your face to a human being, and be banished forever from your fellow playthings, so that Jessie can have a friend of her own kind again?

"I'm going to wait in the restroom for a few minutes to give you a chance to discuss that. When I come out, I'll see if anyone's stepped forward."

* * *

I let out a long, whistling breath as the door of the men's room thudded shut behind me. _Okay,_ I thought. _The gauntlet's down. Now it's up to them._

I cocked an ear to see if I could hear any of the deliberations that I hoped were going on in the main part of the store, but the walls of Nothern's Toys are pretty solid slabs of wood; it's not easy for sound to penetrate them. (Which was good, of course, since it meant that no-one outside the store could have heard my little speech, but it was annoying now.) I thought I could just barely make out a few wisps of phrases – "_what does he think_"; "_that poor cowgirl_"; "_don't be stupid, Barbie_" – but it could just as easily have been my imagination.

It dawned on me afresh just how absurd this whole situation was. Did I really expect a toy to step off one of those shelves out there and walk home with me? I remembered the time when I was seven and had convinced myself, after Dad had read _The Magic of Oz_ to me, that I would actually be able to turn myself into a parrot if I could just learn to say **P y r z q x g l **properly; was this really any different?

Well, sure it was. I had no evidence that anyone could change his shape by saying a word, whereas I did have evidence that toys could come to life. But why should I believe that it really was _all _toys? I'd certainly never seen any toys other than Jessie and the Prospector do it; all I had to go on was a few fugitive impressions and Jessie's word – and Jessie wasn't exactly a model of emotional stability.

But I'm making this look like a logical thought process, when really it was anything but. The real issue was that, whatever my brain might say, I couldn't _feel_ anything but a dismal certainty that all this was pointless: that the world really was the way it had always looked to me, and that, when I opened the restroom door, the toys would still be sitting there, none of them having moved an inch.

And, sure enough, after a few minutes had passed and I stepped back into Nothern's proper, that was just what I saw. Not a Troll, not a Tamagotchi, not even a jack was out of place. It was exactly what I ought to have seen, according to the rules of the universe that I had been raised to accept – and it was exactly what I had hoped I wouldn't see.

I tried to tell myself that this was only to be expected. Jessie had told me how important the Rule of Concealment was to her people; the number of toys who were willing to break it out of sheer altruism had to be miniscule, and there was no reason to suppose that one of them was in this tiny little store in Commerce City. If I wanted to have decent odds of success, I would have had to try this stunt in some really big store – that place up in Michigan with all the Christmas bric-a-brac, maybe. A toy Santa Claus would be the perfect candidate for this kind of thing.

But I knew I was just kidding myself. I would never in a million years work up the nerve to do something like this twice, and certainly not in any store big enough to have a decent security system. This little excursion of mine had been my – and Jessie's – one chance, and it hadn't worked. That was how life went, sometimes.

I headed miserably back to the door, listening to my footsteps groan on the floorboards and thinking that I knew just how they felt. Then, suddenly, I stopped; there was another sound coming off the floorboards, too. It was a sort of soft, rhythmic tapping sound – as though someone was walking behind me who had small, plastic feet.

I turned around slowly, hardly daring to breathe, and saw what was making the sound. One of the best-selling action figures of recent years was standing behind me, wearing an expression of awkward self-consciousness rather than his usual confident grin.

When he saw me looking at him, he stiffened to attention and snapped me a Star-Command salute. "Greetings, Vast One," he said. "Commander Buzz Lightyear at your service."

* * *

It took all my self-control to keep from laughing hysterically in sheer relief. "Much obliged, Commander," I said. "So I managed to get to you after all, did I?"

The Commander hesitated. "Well, in a sense," he said. "I didn't quite understand everything you said – and I'm not sure how you managed to rouse me from hyper-sleep without keying in the authorization code – but no self-respecting Space Ranger could ignore such an urgent appeal for aid." And he drew himself up proudly, as though summoning up all the dignity that a blatant Skywalker rip-off like him could muster.

I nodded with all appropriate solemnity. I remembered Jessie and the Prospector, back in the closet in O'Hare, getting the greatest joy imaginable out of enacting a scene from their television show; if that was what helped this little guy cope with the trauma of breaking the R.o.C., I could play along.

"You're a credit to your Corps, Mr. Lightyear," I said, pulling out a fifty-dollar bill and sliding it underneath the cash register. "All right, now, follow me – and try not to attract attention when we get out on the street."


	18. The Heart of This Star–Crossed Voyager

"And home again," said Mom, releasing the parking brake and popping the trunk. "Help your father get the bags out of the back, will you, Jake?"

"Sure thing," I said, and jumped out of the car before Dad had time to unbuckle his seatbelt. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have been nearly so enthusiastic – it was just Mom's usual Commerce-City-trip haul, after all – but, in this case, it was imperative that I have first choice of which bags to unload.

The specific one I was looking for was a plastic bag from Banana Republic, containing three or four sweaters that somehow managed to be thick and woolen and clingy, all at the same time. (My mom is very proud of having retained her schoolgirl figure into her mid-40s, and she's not going to let a little thing like a Rocky-Mountain winter keep her from showing it off.) It was right near the top of the pile in the trunk, and I slung it over my shoulder, grabbed a picture frame for verisimilitude, and hurried into the house.

"Okay, Commander," I whispered, ushering Jessie's new friend-to-be out of the tangle of sweaters he had been hiding in. "Head upstairs, and wait for me behind the ficus in the loft. I'll be up in a second."

"Affirmative, Mr. Peters," said the Commander. "And then you will present me to this bovine female humanoid that you describe?"

I sighed. "Yeah, that's right."

I'd long since given up trying to explain to the Commander what a "cowgirl" was. I was beginning to think that his valiant-Space-Ranger manner might not be the façade I'd thought it was; maybe he genuinely believed that he was an interstellar traveler newly arrived on Earth. In which case, it would be interesting to watch him and Jessie interact.

* * *

We finished unloading the car, and then Mom went back to the den to check her e-mail while Dad crashed on the couch with a _Sports Illustrated_ he'd picked up on the way home. Neither of them went upstairs, for which I was grateful; I wasn't at all sure that the ficus was really a secure hiding place for the Commander, and it would have provoked a lot of awkward questions if either Mom or Dad had noticed him.

I hurried upstairs, flashed a confidential signal to the Commander, and opened the door to my room. Jessie was sitting on the windowsill, watching either the birds or the cars outside (or both); when she heard the door open, she jumped a little bit and whirled her head around, then let out a relieved sigh when she saw who it was. "Oh, hi, Jake," she said. "Back already, huh?"

"I told you around ten o'clock," I pointed out. "It's almost noon now."

Jessie gave me a look. "Were you born persnickety, or did your mother raise you that way?"

Not for the first time, I reflected how different the talking toys I knew were from Hans Christian Andersen characters. "Well, never mind," I said. "So how have you been?"

Jessie shrugged. "All right, I guess," she said. "How was the Safari?"

"I enjoyed it," I said. "Not as much as some other times, of course, but I did enjoy it."

"Why not as much as some other times?" said Jessie.

"Well, you can't get the maximum enjoyment out of something if you're busy working out a plan to get a toy to break the Rule of Concealment, can you?"

That got Jessie's full attention. "What?"

I grinned, stepped to the side, and called out into the loft. "Ready for you, Commander."

And Buzz Lightyear, Commander of the Space Ranger Corps, hero of the Galactic Alliance, and heir to the throne of the Zurgian Empire, stepped into my bedroom and got his first look at Jessie of Cactus Gulch.

* * *

Jessie's reaction was about what I'd expected: sheer, wide-eyed, speechless shock. If she'd had a bloodstream, I'm pretty sure it would have given her a heart attack when the Commander walked in. (After everything she'd put me through over the last few months, I took a certain malicious satisfaction in that.)

What surprised me, though, was the Commander's reaction. I'd expected him to give Jessie one of those famous eyebrow arches before bowing and introducing himself. Instead, the expression underneath his helmet was one of – well, sheer, wide-eyed, speechless shock.

If you ever want to feel awkward, try being the only human being in the room while two toys stand and gape at each other for about three-quarters of a minute. I was starting to wonder if maybe I should go to the bathroom and let them work it out between themselves when the Commander found his voice.

"Peters," he whispered, "how could you compare this creature to a bovine female?"

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Never," said the Commander, "in fifteen years' service in all corners of the Galaxy, have I seen anything so… so…" He took a deep breath, clearly trying to pull himself together. "I take it you are Jessie?"

Jessie shot me an uncertain glance. "Am I?" she said vaguely.

"Last time I checked," I said.

Without further ado, the Commander leaped up to the top of the nearest bedpost, scuttled across my headboard, and arrived at Jessie's side on the windowsill in a little under two seconds. (His speed and agility surprised me, although I suppose toys have to have that; after all, if they couldn't jump back into their expected positions with only a couple seconds' warning, the Rule of Concealment would be a hard thing to keep as long as they have.) "Commander Buzz Lightyear, madam," he said, bowing deeply. "Your associate, Mr. Peters, informed me of your plight, and I have agreed to serve as your companion for as long as you should require."

"Oh," said Jessie, who still looked a little dazed from the shock of the meeting. "Well, that's mighty kind of you."

The Commander didn't reply; he was too busy gazing into Jessie's eyes as though the secret of the universe was encoded somewhere in her paint job. Jessie didn't look particularly comfortable about this, and I decided it was time to intervene before she opened his helmet and punched him one. "Could you excuse us for a moment, Commander?" I said. "Jessie and I have a couple of things we'd like to discuss."

The Commander blinked, and shook himself. "Er, yes, of course, Peters," he said.

"Thanks."

I picked up Jessie and walked briskly out of the room, down the hallway, and into the upstairs bathroom, where I put her down on the sink and knelt down until I was at her eye level. "Okay, Jess," I said. "I'm sure you have half a million questions right about now. To keep this thing within reasonable bounds, I will answer any five of them you choose. Fire away."

Jessie nodded slowly. "Okay, that's fair," she said. "Here's my first question. _How?_"

So I told her about Tim and Nothern's Toys, about my little speech over the intercom and the Commander's gallant self-sacrifice on her behalf. It took about five minutes to relate it all; when I was done, she stared at me for a few seconds and then let out a long breath. "Well, I'll be a sidewinder's grandmother," she said. "You've got some real spunk there, partner."

"Thanks," I said, "but I can't take much credit for that. When a person lives with you, insane chutzpah is a survival skill."

Jessie looked down at the sink and twirled her ponytail self-consciously. "Yeah, I suppose I have put you through a Texas-style rodeo this summer," she said. "Sorry, Jake."

So help me, I smiled. Even in abashed mode, Jessie's a heart-winner; there's a reason they called irresistibly cute girls "dolls". I tried to sound stern, though, when I said, "Well, just don't let it happen again. What's your second question?"

Jessie raised her head again, and looked thoughtful. "Let's see," she said. "How about this? That Commander of yours: is he all right upstairs?"

"I figured you'd know that better than I would," I said. "I thought maybe this was just a phase that all toys went through – that, when my mom first bought you, you thought you were a real Wild-West cowgirl for a while."

"Your mom didn't buy me," said Jessie vaguely. "I was a Christmas present."

"Whatever."

"And no, that's not normal," said Jessie. "We have our problems, sure, but we don't usually need to be told that we're children's playthings."

I shrugged. "Okay, if you say so. I guess the Commander's in for a rude awakening one of these days, then."

"I reckon he is," said Jessie. "How many questions do I have left?"

I grinned. "Well, it was three before you asked that one," I said. "Now I guess you're down to two."

Jessie's jaw dropped, and I braced myself for a deluge of colorful Western expletives, '50s-kiddie-show-style. Then, to my surprise, she changed her mind and laughed. "Okay, you got me on that one," she said. "So here's question four: What was he looking at me like that for?"

"Like what?" I said, as though I didn't know.

Jessie waved her hand. "You know. That goggle-eyed thing he was doing just before he said the thing about bovine females. Like I was his first sight of the Pebbly Mountains or something."

I pursed my lips, trying to figure out how to explain the concept of romantic passion to Jessie. I was pretty sure there hadn't been any romance on _Woody's Roundup_, and that was her only real source of knowledge about a lot of life – except for what she'd managed to learn as the plaything of my mom and my aunt, neither of whom had been much interested in boys until fairly late in life. (That was why they'd both waited to marry until they were in their thirties.)

"I think you remind him of someone he knew once," I ventured. It was a complete stab in the dark, but, once it was out of my mouth, I realized it might well have been true: I'd never noticed it before, but, if you ignored Jessie's clothes and hairstyle and just focused on her face, she did look an awful lot like Princess Arcturia. In fact, the resemblance was so uncanny that I couldn't help wondering whether the guy who produced _Buzz Lightyear of Star Command_ had watched _Woody's Roundup_ as a kid.

Jessie scrunched up her brow in puzzlement (making her look even more like the Lightyear love interest; I wondered how I'd missed it all this time), but I guess she decided that it wasn't worth blowing her last question to explore the subject further. "Okay, then," she said. "I've got one more to go?"

I nodded.

"What are you going to do with him?"

That wasn't what I had been expecting. "Huh?"

"What… are you… going… to do… with him?" Jessie repeated slowly. "Come on, Jake, it's a simple question."

"Yeah, it is," I acknowledged, "but I'm still not sure I get it. I've already talked him into exposing himself, brought him back here, and introduced the two of you to each other; what more do you want me to do?"

Jessie rolled her eyes. "Jake, honestly, you're just plain hopeless sometimes," she said. "You don't seriously think you're going to get away with keeping him up here, do you? Sooner or later, your parents are going to notice him, and then you'll have to explain where you got him, and how, and why…"

"I didn't say it was going to be easy," I said. "But if it's what you need, I can deal with it."

At that, Jessie smiled – the first genuinely happy smile I think I'd ever seen on her face. "That's real sweet of you, Jake," she said. "I think you're the nicest boy I've ever met."

"I'm the only boy you've ever met," I pointed out.

"Well, almost," said Jessie. "There was that little hooligan who came to Dana's ninth birthday party and tried to use me as a…" She trailed off, and coughed daintily. "Well, never mind. Like I said, it's lovely that you're willing to do this for my sake, but I don't think it's really necessary. It wasn't not having another toy like me in the house that I minded; it was not knowing whether there was another toy like me anywhere. So long as I know I'm not alone, I think I'll be okay."

That made sense. It was a little bit of a relief, too; I hadn't been looking forward to having that mental case of a Commander lodging with us indefinitely. Still… "So what are you proposing we do with him?" I said. "Just turn him loose outside and let him wander the roads, like we did with your friend the Prospector?"

"Great Tetons, no," said Jessie. "You can't let a toy who thinks he's a Space Marshal go wandering around the mountains. He'd kill himself in half an hour, trying to rocket over a gorge or something. No, I was thinking of something else."

"What?"

Jessie smiled slyly. "Didn't you tell me the other day that Beth's birthday was coming up in a couple weeks?"


	19. You've Got a Friend in Me

It took a bit of fast talking, and an awful lot of womanly wiles on Jessie's part (for someone who didn't know anything about romance, she picked up the knack of exploiting it awfully fast), but we eventually managed to persuade the Commander to go along with the plan. And thus it happened that, on the afternoon of October 9, 1999, Jessie and I heard the phone ring, and, a few seconds later, heard Mom call me up the stairs. "Jake?" she said. "It's for you."

"Who is it?" I said, as though I didn't know.

"It's your cousin, the birthday girl," said Mom. "And she sounds pretty excited. I'm guessing that you did right by her."

"Well, that's good," I said. "Okay, I'll get it up here."

As I got up from the bed, Jessie leaped up and clung to my left shoulder, her legs dangling down against my back. "You think she's found out by now?" she whispered.

"I don't see why else she should be excited," I said. "The Buzz Lightyear craze was four years ago, and Beth wasn't a huge fan even then."

"Mm." Jessie kicked her toe against my back nervously. "I wonder what Louise and her husband thought when she opened it, then. You don't think we gave anything away, do you?"

I shrugged – just with the right shoulder, since I didn't want to pitch Jessie off. "I doubt it," I said. "They might have thought it was a little weird, but I'm sure Beth found a way to pass it off. She's a smart girl."

Jessie started to respond, but I'd made it to the phone by this point, so I shushed her and picked up the receiver. "Hello?" I said.

"Oh, there he is," came Mom's voice from the downstairs phone. "All right, Beth, I'll talk to you later. Happy birthday."

"Thanks, Aunt Dana," said Beth.

There was a tiny click as Mom put her receiver down, and Beth's voice suddenly sprang to life. "Jacob Peters, I am going to _murder_ you!" she shouted.

A bit inflammatory, you might think, but I stayed calm. One has to maintain a cool head, when confronted with the emotional excesses of the female sex. "Could you repeat that a little louder, Beth?" I said. "I don't think everyone on the Eastern Seaboard heard you."

"Don't even try to weasel out of this, Jake," said Beth. "What's the idea, sending me a Buzz Lightyear that comes to life as soon as I'm alone with it? You know there's heart trouble in my dad's family; if I didn't eat Cheerios regularly, I could easily be in the hospital right now."

"You believe that, what they say about whole oats?" I said. "Because my dad says…"

"Jake." Beth's voice could have frozen helium. "Never mind about oats, or your dad's crackpot ideas, or any other subject you might wish to bring up at a later date. Just get down on your knees and start begging my forgiveness for so directly endangering my well-being."

I sighed. "Okay, okay. I'm sorry, Beth; probably I should have given you some warning…"

"He's not on his knees," Jessie sing-songed.

"If I were you, Jessie, I'd keep quiet right about now," said Beth. "You're implicated in this, too, you know. –You were saying, Jake?"

"Well, what can I say?" I said. "I thought you needed a little bit of excitement in your life. Living out there in New York, I mean, with nothing but the occasional murder to break the monotony, while I'm out here in the thick of things."

"Oh, you are, are you?"

"Absolutely," I said. "You know, just the other day one of Sheriff Brewer's deputies had to order a replacement badge, because he'd left his old one out on the porch and a crow had stolen it? Obviously the first blow in Nature's planned reconquest of the Laramide orogeny. Now, you're never going to have anything like that, because what would Nature do with that pile of concrete you live in? So, you see, it was really my cousinly duty to…"

A bubbling laugh from the other end interrupted me. "Okay, Jake," said Beth. "You win. But seriously, what have you and Jessie been up to, out there in the boondocks?"

I hesitated. "Well, that's kind of a sensitive subject," I said. "See, Jessie has friends that she wants to protect, and it'll compromise them if I say too much over the phone. Let's just say that…" I thought for a second. "Okay, you remember what you said about your teddy bear, back when we first saw the photos?"

"Um… vaguely," said Beth, sounding puzzled.

"Well, let's just say that, if he had chosen to, he could have."

"Could have…" Beth repeated slowly. It took her a second or two, but then the light bulb went on. "Oh," she said softly. "Oh, I see. You mean… it's _all _of them?"

"Every last one," I said.

"But, then, why…" Beth started, then caught herself. "Right, of course. You can't tell me over the phone. Who knows, maybe the international crow conspiracy has tapped your wires."

"I was thinking more about whether Mom might overhear," I said.

"Okay, fine," said Beth. "But I'll expect you to have written me a letter within the week, telling me _everything_ about this. If you leave out even _one_ single detail, you'll have the wrath of a Riley woman to contend with, and you know what that means."

"In a general way, I do," I agreed. "And I can imagine most of the details. Okay, it's a deal."

"Good," said Beth. "There's one question, though, that I do want an answer to right away, and I think you can give it to me without burning your mother's ears too badly."

"Shoot."

"Are we the only ones who know?"

I hesitated. "You mean, the only full-size ones?"

"Yeah."

"I think so," I said. "Jessie said there were a couple other people who had found out partway, like we did in July, but she never said anything about anyone else getting the full story. And even among the partial initiates, the only person she named had a 19th-Century ballet written about her, so I'm guessing she's probably dead by now."

Beth missed that last comment completely. (I know, because two months later I happened to make a reference to Jessie and the Nutcracker in a letter to her, and she had no idea what I was talking about.) "So you're saying," she said slowly, "that there's this whole other world going on all around us – that all we have to do is turn our backs for it to spring to life – and that, out of all the six billion people in the world, you and I are the only people who know about it."

"Basically, yeah."

Beth let out a deep breath. "Wow," she said. "Suddenly, I feel a lot more than just one year older."

"Oh, yeah, about that," I said. "Listen, I know I didn't send a marsupial card this year, and I'm sorry about that. I didn't forget our tradition, I promise; it's just that I couldn't find a decent one in the stores, and things have been so hectic lately that I never had time to…"

Beth's laughter bubbled up from the receiver again. "It's okay, Jake, really," she said. "I wouldn't have minded if you'd forgotten. After everything you've done, I wouldn't have minded if you'd forgotten my name."

"Oh," I said. "Well… okay, if you say so, Cindy."

That one really took Beth apart. It took her nearly a minute to recover from her giggling fit; when she finally spoke again, it was in a weak, gasping voice. "Oh," she said. "Oh, that hurt. Jake, you're an out-and-out rascal, you know that?"

I grinned. "I've heard rumors to that effect, yes."

"Well, believe them," said Beth. "Listen, I need to get going; my parents will be back any minute now, so we can head out to Applebee's for dinner. Is Jessie still there?"

"I'm right here, partner," said Jessie. "What's up?"

"Oh, nothing, really," said Beth. "I just wanted you to know that I've been thinking about you – and to say thank you for whatever help you might have given Jake in this little project of his."

Jessie looked down at my shoulder and started toying with her ponytail, the way she does when she's embarrassed. "Oh, I didn't really do anything," she said. "I didn't even know he was planning it."

"You told me about the Rule of Concealment," I pointed out. "I couldn't have worked it if I hadn't known about that."

"Well, that's true," Jessie admitted, "but you can't give me a whole lot of credit for that. I mean, just because I threw a hissy fit over that Qui-Gon figurine…"

"Oh, give it up, Jess," said Beth. "If I want to be grateful to you, I can be, whether you've done anything to deserve it or not. But never mind. The real reason I wanted you had nothing to do with me."

Jessie blinked. "What do you mean?"

"Well," said Beth coyly, "it just so happens that there's a handsome young Space Ranger sitting next to me who's been pining for the sound of your voice ever since he changed mail planes in Kansas City. I was just wondering if you might be willing to oblige him."

"Oh." If Jessie had had skin, I'm pretty sure she would have blushed at that point. "Well, um… sure. Just give me a sec to get settled here."

She turned to me with a no-nonsense look in her eyes, and pointed to the table. I nodded and put the receiver down, and Jessie jumped down, kneeled beside it, and shooed me away. "Okay, Bethie, put him on," she said.

I tiptoed discreetly back to my bedroom, but couldn't (or, at any rate, didn't) help overhearing the first few lines of her side of the conversation. "Yeah, Commander, I'm here." Pause. "Well, maybe it is primitive, but it does the job all right." Pause, followed by a nervous giggle. "Oh, I don't think I'd like that. I get antsy enough around cameras…"

* * *

About five minutes later, Jessie came back into my room, clearly trying not to grin like a lifelong wallflower after her first dance. Her efforts weren't doing much good, though.

"So how's the good Commander doing?" I said.

"None of your beeswax," said Jessie automatically. Then, after her brain had had a few seconds to process the question thoroughly, "That is, um… he's all right."

"Is he?" I said, smiling broadly. "I guess all that pining isn't as bad for a person as they make it sound."

It was utterly cruel of me, of course. I'd been through all this already (with Sophie Walker, my hopeless crush throughout junior high), whereas Jessie was a complete rookie. I should have been offering her sage counsel, instead of needling her mercilessly for the sheer pleasure of watching her confusion. But, if you'd been in my place, I'll bet you wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation, either.

Jessie squeezed her ponytail like a prize Guernsey teat. "Well, I don't know," she murmured. "You know what Beth's like… high-spirited… sometimes she exaggerates things…"

"Oh, of course," I said. "So the Commander didn't say anything about wishing that our backward planet had invented holographic communication, so he could gaze into your eyes while you spoke?"

Jessie's jaw dropped open, and I congratulated myself on my detective skills. It wasn't everyone who could have worked that out from the little I'd overheard.

"I… er…" Jessie started. Then I guess she decided that she couldn't win this conversation, because she suddenly changed the subject. "What was that business about marsupial cards?"

"Oh, that," I said. "Nothing important, really. It's just that, when Beth was a lot younger, she did this school project on Australia, and in the process just fell in love with the idea of animals keeping their babies in pouches. It only lasted a few months, but those few months happened to include both our birthdays and Christmas, so, by the time it blew over, we'd established this tradition of only sending each other cards that involved kangaroos, or koalas, or opossums, or whatever. We've been doing it ever since."

Jessie sighed. "Must be nice," she said.

I shrugged. "It's all right, I guess. It can be a real pain sometimes, though, looking for Christmas cards with koalas on them…"

Jessie shook her head. "That's not what I mean," she said. "I'm talking about having secret things like that, just you and the other person."

"Oh, that," I said. "Yeah, I suppose that's nice. I don't really think much about it, though."

"No, you wouldn't," said Jessie. "That's the best part, not having to think about it. But it's a special thing you two have, all the same."

I raised an eyebrow. "Not just the two of us," I said. "You and the Commander are part of it, now."

"Oh, go on," said Jessie, with a little toss of her head. I could see she was pleased, though.

"Well, you don't think we'll be able to keep you two out of it, do you?" I said. "Probably every time we talk from now on, whether it's in letters or on the phone or in person, we'll spend about half of it telling each other what you've been up to. Like it or not, Jessie, you're part of the club."

Jessie was positively beaming now. "Well, thanks, Jake," she said. "I'll try to do it credit."

"I'm sure you will," I said.

* * *

And she has. It's been nearly eight months now, and the four of us have just gotten closer. Jessie still has her neurotic moments, and we never have managed to convince the Commander that he isn't a stranded Space Ranger, but neither Beth nor I really mind that anymore. "What do we have to complain about?" as Beth put it the other day. "We have _magic_ living in our bedrooms."

There are times when I still find it hard to believe. The hidden life of toys – a secret as old as mankind – sometimes I wonder when I'm going to wake up. But then I take another look at Jessie, sitting on the windowsill with that little smile that she gets when she watches the bluebirds, and I decide that waking up is overrated anyway.

I wish I had some profound thought to end this book with, but I don't. Profundity's for wise old men on mountaintops, not everyday schmoes like me. The best I can do is leave you with a few pieces of advice: Brush your teeth regularly. Never treat a person as a mere means. Don't throw your old toys away without at least saying good-bye to them first.

And don't underestimate the wondrousness of the world. Don't assume that, just because you've seen something every day for fourteen years, you've figured out all its secrets. There are more miracles within five miles of you than some people are willing to let into the whole universe. Trust me; I know.

_Adiós, mis lectores._ Or, as a friend of mine says when you pull her string, _"Come on, Sheriff, that sunset's just waiting for someone to ride into it."_ In any case, good-bye.

**THE END**


End file.
